Ocean Notorious

by Matt Vance

  First edition published in 2015 by Awa Press,

  Unit 1, Level 3, 11 Vivian Street,

  Wellington 6011, New Zealand.

  ISBN 978-1-927249-26-0

  Ebook formats

  Epub 978-1-927249-27-7

  Mobi 978-1-927249-28-4

  Copyright © Matt Vance 2015

  The right of Matt Vance to be identified as the author of this work in terms of Section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  Cover photograph Rob Suisted / naturespic.com

  Cover design by Katrina Berry

  Typesetting by Tina Delceg

  Ebook conversion 2017 by meBooks

  Find more great books at awapress.com.

  Produced with the assistance of

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  The ocean that doesn’t exist

  Islands

  Bounty

  Birdman

  Coastwatchers

  Ornithology

  Lonely tree

  Extinctions great and small

  Macquarie Island scone

  Island of kings

  Ocean

  Alone

  First aid

  B-15A

  Breaking the ice

  Ice

  Magnetic south

  A dead lion

  Trick of the light

  Scott’s dream

  Symmes’ hole

  Message from the living world

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Illustration credits

  Index

  ALSO BY MATT VANCE

  How to Sail a Boat

  MATT VANCE is a New Zealand writer, photographer and passionate sailor. He has been a lecturer and guide on numerous expeditions to the outposts of the Southern Ocean, from the subantarctic islands to the Antarctic continent, and has accompanied writers, journalists, artists and photographers south in Antarctica New Zealand’s Artists and Media programmes. He lives in Diamond Harbour, New Zealand with his wife Nancy and their two children.

  For Mila and Baie

  Preface

  It would have been nice to ignore the rattle of the wind on the roof, sit by the fire, and say to anyone who’d listen, ‘I’d like to go there some day.’ But I had a desperate urge. The urge ground away at me. For a while I tried to ignore it, then I resorted to every trick I knew to get to the deep south.

  For three years nothing worked. I lost hope. I was trying to forget the place when I received a polite phone call inviting me to a job interview.

  ‘It’s no weather to be at sea,’ an elderly woman said as I passed her on the pavement. She was leaning into the wind like a sprinter and barely making headway. A gale roared in the treetops. It was the kind of winter’s day when you could feel the south.

  The wind hurled me through the door of the office and slammed it behind me. A respectable silence sprang up as my senses adjusted to the peace.

  Out of the calm Shirley appeared. She and her husband Rodney had started a business showing travellers first-hand the wild majesty of the Southern Ocean. The business had blossomed and now had something of a cult following.

  I was given a cup of tea and ushered into Rodney’s office. In the right circumstances you can learn a lot about someone in a few minutes. Rodney exuded passion. It was in his every word as he pushed aside the piles of paperwork on his desk. He had experienced the first wisps of the Southern Ocean as a cadet working for the Wildlife Service and it had willed him on ever since. He was the kind of person who thought nothing of going to university and studying Pacific history and theology while refining his knowledge of high latitude zoology. He had the radiance of someone who had found his purpose in life.

  We talked of sailing and islands and dreams of journeys yet to be made. After an hour I noticed the cup of tea had gone cold in my hand. I had clean forgotten this was supposed to be a job interview.

  So had Rodney. As we lingered at the door of his office he said, almost as an afterthought, ‘Can you make the first trip of the season in November?’ I don’t recall replying yet I must have. My head was a maelstrom of winds, monstrous waves, and albatrosses gliding over a forgotten ocean. I had already gone south.

  The ocean that doesn’t exist

  43°38′S

  In 1953, with the stroke of a pen, the most important ocean on the planet disappeared.

  The truth is the Southern Ocean had been shrinking for some time, retreating south and being eroded in increments. As gales roared over its waters and legions of albatrosses wheeled across its skies, bureaucrats and policymakers were busy plotting its demise.

  It all started back in 1914, when the newly formed International Hydrographic Bureau attempted to agree on borders and names for the world’s oceans and seas. Although this sounds like the basis of a Monty Python skit, it was a serious attempt at defining ownership of the unownable. Ten years later the bureau produced a publication entitled Limits of Oceans and Seas.

  The Southern Ocean, one of the bureau’s targets, had a venerable history. Captain James Cook had been one of the first to prove that the planet’s deep south consisted of a single great body of water. This came as a disappointment: he had been hoping to find the fabled continent Terra Australis. When his voyages of the late 1770s produced nothing but endless sea dotted with tiny islands, the ocean was given over to whalers, sealers and sailors. These men gave it a multitude of names, among them Great Southern Ocean, Grand Ocean and Southern Icy Ocean.

  Things remained that way until 1919, when the bureau officially named it the Southern Ocean; its northern boundary was drawn to neatly touch the coasts of South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The naming of the ocean gave formal recognition to what every sailor had known all along – that this was a singular, distinctive and significant body of water – but the bureau was never to reach such heights of common sense again. At each subsequent meeting it pushed the boundaries of its neighbouring oceans south, until in 1953 the Southern Ocean disappeared altogether.

  A later edition of Limits of Oceans and Seas explained: ‘The Antarctic or Southern Ocean has been omitted from this publication as the majority of opinions received since the issue of the 2nd Edition in 1937 are to the effect that there exists no real justification for applying the term Ocean to this body of water, the northern limits of which are difficult to lay down owing to their seasonal change. The limits of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans have therefore been extended South to the Antarctic Continent.’

  Since then there have been attempts by the International Hydrographic Organization – as the bureau was renamed in 1970 – to reinstate the Southern Ocean but disagreement has always broken out among the delegates. Today such disparate parties as Encyclopaedia Britannica and the CIA recognise the Southern Ocean while the National Geographic Society chooses to ignore it.

  As you may have concluded, the drawing of boundaries was always wishful thinking. The limits of this ocean move north and south with the seasons. Its howling west winds can reach as far north as latitude 35° South in the southern winter and retreat as far as 50° South in summer. For those who sail there, the ocean is felt as an unnerving and almighty power, a tightening somewhere deep
in the gut.

  The sailors who frequented these waters in the era of sailing ships gave the latitudes names: the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, the Screaming Sixties. They were describing the only thing that matters in the Southern Ocean – wind. Theirs were not yarns, dreamed up to scare the pants off landlubbers. The winds were real. They made this ocean the most feared on the planet. Even today, to say among sailors that you have sailed the Southern Ocean is like saying you have descended into hell. Their eyes brighten. They take you aside and ask tremulously, ‘What was it like?’

  That the Southern Ocean is one of the most consistently windy stretches of water on Earth is largely due to heat and pressure. The equatorial regions receive the vertical blaze of the sun and so have an excess of heat. The polar regions have a deficit of heat. Wind is the atmosphere’s attempt to even out the difference, like the thermostat of an air-conditioning system. Where the air is cool it descends, causing high pressure; where it is hot it rises, causing low pressure. The fact the planet is rotating means that big masses of air and water do not follow a straight line but rather a spiral, which whirls towards the left in the southern hemisphere and toward the right in the northern hemisphere. This gets complicated very quickly and is the reason meteorologists earn their money.

  Over the interior of Antarctica the air is cold, which means it can do only one thing – descend. On the edges of this large polar high, low-pressure systems drag warm air south and shunt cold air north, at the same time sending the relatively warm sea air upwards. Seen from a satellite the land mass looks like an icy kingdom surrounded by a marauding pack of spinning hounds, which encircle it as though at the perimeter fence of a drug lord’s mansion.

  It is the northernmost edges of this pack of hounds, known to meteorologists as ‘deep low-pressure systems’, which force a continuous flow of wind from west to east. As each low-pressure system passes, the flow goes from the warmer north-west to the cooler south-west and back again.

  The waves these westerly winds generate are among the largest on the planet. The strength of a wind and the distance it has travelled – a combination known as ‘fetch’ – determine the height of waves. A small lake has a short fetch so it is capable of generating only a sharp chop, even in strong winds. An ocean such as the Atlantic has a few thousand nautical miles of fetch so it can generate a sizeable swell. When the Drake Passage opened up thirty million years ago it gifted the Southern Ocean an infinite fetch. This is the one ocean that has no land to break up the sea’s endless circuit. Even on the calmest days, it has a constant heave from the west. On the worst days the size of the swell can make your heart stop.

  1937 International Hydrographic Bureau chart showing limits of the Southern Ocean.

  Like the wind, the surface water of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which flows around the continent, is in a constant drift eastward. Eleven thousand three hundred and thirty-two nautical miles long, the current is a continuous loop moving over 130 million cubic metres of water a second – over a hundred times the flow of every river, stream and creek on Earth combined. It is a major redistributor of energy, a giant flywheel at the bottom of the world keeping the planet’s air-conditioning system going. It also drives the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Ocean gyres, large swirling masses of water that reach as far north as the equator.

  Below the surface currents of the Southern Ocean there are other currents, driven not by wind but by differences in water density. Antarctica is one of only two places that produce something known as deep water, the other being Greenland. Deep water is the densest sea water on the planet. It forms as sea ice leaches its salt into cold water. The density of the resulting water means it sinks to the bottom. For most of the Southern Ocean this is a drop of 4,000 to 5,000 metres.

  This process sets in motion the entire world oceanic system. While the circulation of the oceans is an endless conveyor belt, scientists believe deep-water formation is critical to kick-starting and maintaining this immense transfer of energy.

  You don’t have to sail the Southern Ocean to guess that with all this water moving about there will be some spectacular collisions. The most impressive is the Antarctic Convergence zone, where cool dense Antarctic water moving north meets the relatively warmer water of the Subantarctic and creates an undulating ring of confusion up to twenty-six nautical miles wide around the Antarctic continent between latitudes 48° and 61° South. As the Antarctic water drives under the subantarctic water the vigorous mixing that results brings bottom nutrients to the surface, making the place one of the most productive zones in all the world’s oceans and a bonanza for marine life.

  For those who venture across it, the convergence zone denotes a change in the soul of the Southern Ocean. South of it the sea temperature drops, the fog rolls in and all hope of the north is lost. Things get serious with little chance of rescue: there is now a vast distance between you and the rest of humanity.

  Further south you encounter the first sea ice. At about minus 1.8° Celsius sea water freezes and forms pancakes of ice, which then congeal into a solid frozen surface up to 120 centimetres thick. As winter approaches, vast swathes of the Southern Ocean freeze over, expanding the footprint of the Antarctic continent by up to twenty million square kilometres. By late January the ice begins to break up and is flushed north to dissolve into the wider reaches of the Southern Ocean. This expansion and contraction creates one of the largest annual events by mass on the planet.

  If you speed up satellite images of the growth and disintegration of sea ice on a computer, what you see has a remarkable resemblance to a beating heart. This could be dismissed as the pure fancy of a Gaia theorist were it not for the fact that, beneath the vast structure of winter sea ice, a miniature upside-down forest of marine growth forms each spring as sun penetrates the ice, injecting large quantities of biota into the Southern Ocean.

  Despite the physical enormity of the Southern Ocean, we still know very little about it. It circles Antarctica. It acts as a violent mixer of the Earth’s air and water. It is the one ocean that links all the others. It is feared by sailors. Yet it remains firmly incognito.

  While we could blame the International Hydrographic Organization for this, there’s also another reason. On this ocean, humans can exist only in transition. The idea of real settlement is absurd: staying put is hard to achieve in an ocean hell-bent on picking you up and tumbling you east. So the ocean sits well out of sight at the bottom of the world, and any eyes drawn its way are blinded by the gleaming white of its glamorous companion, Antarctica.

  Bounty Islands.

  Bounty

  47°45′S

  It was my first voyage south: I was now a lecturer and Zodiac driver on a Russian icebreaker full of English birders. As dawn broke, the grey sea undulated with the remains of a small westerly swell. The usual cloud of birds was following the ship, but as the sky lightened I noticed their numbers were being bolstered by more and more Salvin’s albatrosses, swooping in from all directions to look at the ship.

  The Bounties, a small collection of rocky islands, appeared on the horizon. Places with a reputation for being intimidating can seem less so when you visit them. This was not so here: the islands turned out to be grimmer than any written description had revealed. The desolate cluster sat barely fifty metres above sea level and was being swept by massive seas and relentless gales.

  With little protection from the south and nothing resembling a harbour, our ship couldn’t anchor. Two Zodiacs filled with birders were lowered over the side and left heaving in the swell as the ship headed off over the horizon on an hour’s loop.

  As the feeling of isolation increased, the complement on my Zodiac talked in high-pitched voices and laughed nervously. I fixed the islands firmly in my sight and kept my dark thoughts to myself. On the south-western faces I could see a distinct horizontal line on the granite. It obviously marked the extreme limit of the waves that sometimes overwhelmed the islands during passing storms: below the line there were
no more birds’ nests.

  As we bashed our way towards one of the islands, Proclamation, I felt both fearful and exhilarated. We passed through an opening in a rock into a tall thin alleyway between Proclamation and its neighbour Depot Island. The Zodiacs’ motors were cut and we tilted our heads skyward. The sky was black with the comings and goings of Bounty Island shags, Salvin’s albatrosses and fulmar prions. Erect-crested penguins swam around the boat and large smelly dollops of guano floated by.

  Every few seconds the swell lifted us halfway up the granite walls and brought us eye-to-eye with the nesting birds. The helmsman on the other Zodiac boomed theatrically, ‘Welcome to Shitter’s Ditch.’ His voice, echoing off the vertical granite walls, could barely be heard over the din of thousands of birds.

  The English birders, normally loquacious, had fallen completely silent. As the guano showered down on to our clothes and into our hair, some seemed caught between the desire to get a photo and the need to protect their expensive camera gear. Others sat stupefied as their precious bird lists and guidebooks floated around in the bilge.

  These unwelcoming islands were discovered in 1788 by Lieutenant William Bligh, who named them after his dependable ship. It was just months before the infamous mutiny. Bligh described their terrain as ‘bare and desolate, with the inability to afford any vegetable production’. Later he noted, ‘I could not see any verdure on any of the islands. There were white spots like patches of snow but, as Captain Cook in describing the land of New Zealand near South Cape says in many places there are patches of white marble, it is probable that what we saw might be of the same kind he observed.’

  Adélie penguins and Salvin’s albatrosses, Bounty Islands, photographed by William Dougall, c. 1888.