Polar Voyages

by Gray, Gordon

  The Marco Polo was built in East Germany for the Russians in 1966 and she and her sister ship, the Mikhail Lermantov, were managed by the Baltic Shipping Company running a regular transatlantic service between Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and Montreal. Both ships were of 24,000 tons and built for the North Atlantic. She began cruising in the Far East in 1975 and in 1992 was sold to Orient Lines and underwent a major refit in Italy. Her first cruise as the Marco Polo was down through the Suez Canal to South Africa which is where we joined her for her second trip. This was to be Lars-Eric Lindblad’s largest and most ambitious expedition to Antarctica and on the biggest ship ever to go down there. Passenger capacity was reduced to half, to just 400, for safety reasons and to satisfy the demands for minimising the impact of tourism on the Antarctic continent.

  The stab and dull ache of a dodgy tooth woke me in the night. We need to leave for the airport at lunchtime but I dash to the dentist in the morning before we set off. Nothing is found and I am given some tablets to take if it gets worse. We are due to fly from Heathrow to Paris and connect to an Air France night flight down to Cape Town. My tooth is still playing up and I spend our time in Charles de Gaulle Airport, a grey and most depressing place, looking for and failing to find, a shop that sells painkillers.

  Sketch map showing the route of Marco Polo from Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn via Antarctica.

  Marco Polo, originally the Alexander Pushkin, at anchor off Grytviken, South Georgia.

  We arrive at the ship the following day and boarded her, by what must have been one of the longest and highest gangways in the world! It stretched out from near the top of the ship, like a giant feeler, touching the dockside some 30 yards from the ship. As we climbed up and up the gangway and into the ship, it seemed to go on and up forever. The ship towered above us while her new, blue painted hull and white super structure gleamed and shone in the warm South African sun. Thankfully, the tooth seems to have settled down. The ship is gleaming after its refit and we wander through the new public rooms, all clean new and decorated in soft, relaxing colours. Our inside cabin is comfortable, very roomy and with plenty of storage space. By the evening I am feeling fairly ropey again with my tooth and decide to go to bed early in the hope my tooth, helped by painkillers, will settle down. The ship is not due to sail until the following afternoon so that will give us the morning for some sightseeing in Cape Town.

  I wake in the night feeling rough and feverish. I sleep fitfully until, at about five o’clock, I realise that my face has swollen to the size of a melon, or so it feels. I tell Doreen that I am feeling bad but she adopts her Florence Nightingale voice and says sympathetically ‘Look, you are not having a heart attack so go back to sleep as there will be no one around at this hour anyway’. How I love her! She promptly goes back to sleep. I spend the rest of the night thinking ‘Here I am about to go to the Antarctic for over three weeks with freezing temperatures and icy winds, and a bad tooth, a face the size of a melon and no dentist! Great!’

  At 7.30 am I am first in the queue for the sickbay. The doctor looks at me. ‘Oh! We don’t have a dentist here.’ Is that his remedy? However, we do find the ship’s agent, who arranges for me to be taken to a local dentist in his van. Dr Van de Merve is a good man. He identifies the offending tooth, which has abscessed and drains it without any fuss. The relief as his drill cuts through the tooth to relieve the pressure of the poison is wonderful. He asks me where the ship is going and when I tell him he says ‘Oh dear!’ in a doom-laden tone. I panic as I think he is about to ban me from travelling but he decides that he needs to work harder to clear out the remaining poison and he sets too again squeezing my face and gums a lot harder with his fingers and thumbs of both hands. With that all done, he stuffs cotton wool into my bad tooth, gives me a big packet of penicillin tablets and sends me back to the ship. We sail an hour later. That night after dinner, Doreen and I stand together at the stern rail and watch the lights of Cape Town get smaller as we head off past Cape Point, the Cape of Good Hope on our ‘Cape to Cape’ voyage via Antarctica.

  On our first day at sea the weather deteriorates and it is deemed too rough to hold lifeboat drill. I spend the day taking life easy, trying to read and eating penicillin tablets. During the day I realise that I have left my camera somewhere out on deck during the day. I report it to the Purser. I assume that I must have left it out on deck when I came back from the dentist and as I was not totally ‘with it’, and forgot to pick it up. It never turned up but we at least had Doreen’s Olympus Trip as a back-up.

  After a few days the weather improves and my face returns to its normal size. I begin to feel a bit more human and have a full American breakfast to celebrate. It is a nice sunny day and we see our first albatross, a yellow-nosed albatross, which spends most of the afternoon wheeling around the stern of the ship. Our first call is at Tristan da Cunha where we are to go ashore for the morning. Ships normally lie off in an open roadstead near the settlement of Edinburgh and all stores and people are transferred by small, open boat as there is no sheltered anchorage and certainly no harbour. However, today, there is a big swell running into the settlement and the ship is rolling heavily as she stops off the coast. The local boats come out and try to come alongside but the heavy swell makes it difficult for them to approach the ship. The captain correctly deems it too dangerous to transfer passengers to small open boats with the 10 to 12 foot swell running. The trip ashore is therefore cancelled. Even so, there were passengers who thought they knew better and complained bitterly to ship’s staff that the brochure had said they would go ashore at Tristan da Cunha!

  Southern Ocean

  South Georgia is 1,400 miles away from Tristan da Cunha and way down in the Southern Ocean, deep in the Roaring Forties; home to endless gales and huge seas. The Southern Ocean is a vast, mystical place, a place of mariner’s tales and empty loneliness. It is an ocean where only albatrosses and the strongest and best-sailed ships can survive. The ocean begins to live up to its reputation. During the next day, the sea gradually gets up as the wind increases from the south-west. A large, low pressure area is moving towards us and we are told to expect heavy weather. As the morning goes on, the ship starts to pitch and broken seas wash across the fo’c’sle as the ship slides down into the troughs between the growing waves. Her bows throw masses of white water aside as she pushes her 24,000 tons down and forward into the next wave. In spite of the howling wind, it is a sunny day with blue skies and scudding white clouds. A few albatrosses still circle the ship as well as some Cape petrels and prions. The albatrosses, on their long thin wings, wheel round the waves with one wing tip millimetres from the water but never ever touching it. Then they swing up to catch more wind and without any apparent movement at all they wheel round in a wide circle and start again. They glide motionless for hours, skimming across the wild, roaring ocean and the breaking seas.

  The clouds cast hard, dark shadows onto the waves as they fly across the sky in a headlong race with the waves towards the east. It is a rough night, with shudders, bangs and crashes echoing through the ship as doors slam and loose items finally let go of their hold and crash across the cabins. In the morning, we go up on deck to find that the wind is now up to about 40 knots, a full gale and howling out of a clear blue sky. It is spectacular. The seas have built up and some of the waves are about 40 to 50 feet high. The ship has slowed down and is still pitching as she tries to hold her course. If we have an engine failure now the seas and wind would knock the ship down and capsize her in seconds. From the open deck, the waves appear like moving mountains ranges of water as they come sweeping towards the ship with a threatening, hypnotic effect. You cannot take your eyes away from them. The ship reaches the bottom of the trough and the wave mountains rear up high above us. As we climb our way up the slopes the rest of the range comes into view and the wind howls louder as we reach the exposed higher slopes. We can again see the vast expanse of range upon range of waves, with their tops blown off leaving white tails streaming f
rom them. The decks tilt forward as the ship begins her slide down the far side and into the next deep valley, the wind drops and it gets quieter down in the shelter of the next mountain of water as it appears ahead and begins to towers above us. So it goes on, hour after hour.

  We are now truly in the Roaring Forties and can absorb the atmosphere of the place, the biting wind that races round the planet and the great, white-crested waves that rear up menacingly and then ignore us as they remorselessly march towards to the east. I have never seen seas like this, the white crested waves and the deep, dark troughs between them stretch out in lines like dark, snow-flecked hills, out into the vast emptiness as far as the eye can see and then further, much further. The sense of emptiness and loneliness of this ocean is awe-inspiring. The albatrosses wheeling round astern of the ship only add to the extreme isolation of the place. If there is another ship or a yacht out there then we will never see it in the vastness of this chaotic spray-coated ocean.

  It is now definitely getting colder too with a real bite in the air. During the afternoon we are told that we are at the half way point to South Georgia and I see the first ‘sooty’ albatross, or Grey Mantled sooty albatross to be correct.

  By the evening the wind is at last dropping and the motion of the ship is a little easier. The waiters set the dining room for dinner. We hope that we are now past the centre of the low pressure system and things will improve. At its peak, it was a full Force 9, gusting to 10. The following day dawns sunny and much calmer; the sea is down to state 4 and wind down to about Force 4 or 5. We have a clear, crisp horizon and a sharper edge to the wind. Aerobic classes start again up in the gym and the restaurant is definitely busier too.

  South Georgia

  The cold, wet, clammy fog wraps itself around the ship. Ten days after leaving the UK, we excitedly go on deck to see the mountains of South Georgia as we make our approach to the island, but we are met by this all-enveloping fog. It swirls around the ship and most passengers stay inside, but we decide to go on deck and tuck ourselves in behind a metal screen, out of the wind. Then, there is a cry from forward. ‘It’s clearing!’ We look out from behind our shelter and in a matter of seconds the fog starts to thin as the ship passes through the entrance to Cumberland Bay. We move out to the bow as we sail out of the solid fog bank and enter a calm, sun-filled, blue and white world. There before us is the most beautiful sight: the open expanse of Cumberland Bay, its blue peaceful waters extend away to left and right. Directly ahead, across the bay, the white, jagged mountain peaks of the Allardyce Range are bathed in sunshine and stretch away north and south with vast sweeps of drifted snow covering their sides. Glistening, silent glaciers come from the mountains down into the bay. Looking astern, we can see the fog bank lying like a solid grey wall on the sea and our wake emerging from it. The huge Nordenskjold Glacier emerges at the southern end of the bay. Cumberland Bay is more like an inland sea than a bay, as the land closes right round to the entrance. It is a calm and serene scene, with the sun warming the green shore line, white clouds gently drift along the tops of the mountains and then clear from Mount Sugartop, above Grytviken, to allow it to look down at the newcomers. A little further to the south, the highest mountain on the Island, Mt Paget, remains aloof and hidden in the clouds.

  South Georgia was officially discovered by Captain cook, who landed here and claimed it for Britain in 1775. He named it ‘Isle de Georgia’ in honour of King George III. The Marco Polo anchors off King Edward’s Point but not without a little difficulty, as the windlass seems to be playing up as they veer out the cable. The old, Norwegian whaling base of Grytviken lies at the head of a small bay just beyond the point. As we leave the ship by boat the storm damage is evident and the blue paint on the bows and hull has been sucked and stripped off by the seas, leaving a rust red finish that does not really enhance the ship’s looks.

  Once ashore at King Edward’s Point we feel the gentle warmth of a summer’s day as we pass the time with a group of young elephant seals who have decided that the main track is a good place to bed down for the afternoon. Some small penguins waddle by on their way to the beach. We had been told by Lars-Eric that under no circumstances must we get closer than 15 feet to any animal. The only problem was no one had told the penguins or seals that. We walk round the bay and arrive at Grytviken.

  Whaling was first started here in 1904 by the Norwegian Carl Larsen. He identified the area as a good spot for shore whaling stations when he was Captain of the Antarctica, the ship carrying the Swedish Antarctic Expedition in 1902 under the Swedish explorer Nordenskjold. Larsen returned here and built Grytviken, which was the site of an earlier base for seal hunters. Their blackened blubber boiling pots were still lying along the shore when Larsen arrived. The name Grytviken means ‘Pot Cove’ in Norwegian. By 1912, there were seven whaling stations on the east coast of the Island run mostly by the Norwegians and the British but some were run by Argentineans and the South Africans. However, by 1964, all whaling had ceased as it was no longer economically viable and the stations were left to fall into ruin. Three of the old whale catchers that never left, the Dias, the albatross and the Petrel, are still here, aground and half submerged in the shallows beside the rotting flensing plan. The Dias and the albatross lie together derelict, silent, rusting and forlorn while further round the bay the Petrel sits in a similar state, untouched, since the last whalers left in 1964. At its peak, nearly 300 men lived and worked here including the crews of the whale catcher boats. There is a small museum in what was the station manager’s house, run by a couple who live on their yacht, which is berthed at the jetty. They look after the base and are most helpful and show us the way round.

  There is wreckage all around as a lot of the old station has been dismantled and the hazardous materials cleaned or removed; but a lot of the iron and steel and the remains of the heavy machinery is still lying around. In addition to the huge wooden flensing plan, where the dead whales were hauled up, the blubber cookers, and the storerooms are exactly as they were left. The most notably building is the beautiful, little, white-painted Norwegian chapel. It was built in Norway and sent out to Grytviken in kit form by Carl Larsen, where it was rebuilt, including two bells. It is as clean and lovely as it must have been in the days when the whalers used it on Sundays. The chapel sits just apart from, but incongruously close to, the main factory area where the massive slaughter of huge whales, the noises of winches and saws, the yells of men, the screams of cutting tools and the smell and steam of boiling whale blubber would fill the air all season long. In the store rooms by the jetty there are still large coils of the whale line that was attached to the harpoons.

  The highlight of the trip ashore is the visit to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s grave. He died here of a heart attack in 1922 after arriving on the Quest for another expedition. His grave is in the whaler’s small graveyard on a hillside just along the beach from the whaling station. The graveyard has a smart, white-painted, palisade fence around it to keep the seals out. Shackleton’s grave has a stone surround with gravel top and a plain, rough-hewn granite tombstone. It says simply:

  To the dear memory of

  Ernest Henry Shackleton

  Explorer

  Born 5th Feb 1874

  Entered life eternal

  Died 5th Jan 1922

  A further memorial to Sir Ernest Shackleton lies round the bay at Hope Point on a small hill overlooking the whole of Cumberland Bay. It is a stone cairn with a white cross on it and was erected by the men of the Quest.

  Sir Ernest Shackleton. (Library of Congress)

  The grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton in the Whaler’s graveyard in Grytviken.

  I wake up and lie still, listening for the throb of the engines. There is no noise. We should have sailed late last night to go to the Bay of Islands but there is no indication that we are at sea at all. I go on deck and find we are still at anchor in Cumberland Bay. It turns out that the windlass motor, which we had noticed had not been too happy when letting out
the anchor, has decided that it certainly won’t be hauling it in. For the present we are stuck. If we cannot get the anchor in then we cannot sail away! They could of course break the cable, put a buoy on it and leave it on the seabed and try to recover it later; but that would be a last resort. The engineers set to work to change the motor from the starboard windlass for the dead one on the port windlass. Once they have done this and heave in the anchor, we can sail but now with only one working windlass. The work will take all day and so gives us an extra day to explore the area. Some of us go with one of the ornithologists to look for the nest site of a sooty albatross. To our delight, not only do we find it, but there is a sooty sitting on the nest. They are big and beautiful birds but they are not as big as the wandering albatross. Their heads and body plumage is a soft charcoal grey that looks like velvet. Their delicate eye markings give them an inquisitive, but nervous look. This one, however, remains firmly on its nest and allows us up to our 15-foot limit. Its nest is on a cliff face and, by carefully climbing down to a nearby grass ledge, we are able to spend ten minutes or so watching the albatross and enjoying the view of the bay from its prime nest site.

  Shackleton’s Nimrod leaves Cowes in 1908 for the Antarctic. (J&C McCutcheon Collection)