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| Three seals lounging around. |
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| The wake of the Zodiac on the glassy sea. |
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| A seal idly checking out its reflection in the water. Perhaps. |
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| Brash ice. |
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| The ice is getting a bit much at this point and we retreat. |
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| Beautifully contoured iceberg. |
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| In less busy waters. |
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| I think this had recently flipped over, exposing what had previously been shaped by the sea. |
The weather remained good, even if the brash ice did quickly surround us at one point. We retreated before we became trapped in it, which served as a healthy reminder that there are no guarantees of safety in the Antarctic. That was even more so at the dawn of the heroic era of Antarctic exploration, when one Emile Danco posthumously gave his name to Danco Island.
He was a member of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1899, which was a fascinatingly disastrous start to the age. It was plagued by problems from the beginning. It was led by Adrien de Gerlache, a Belgian navy man who found himself uninspired by his posting on the Ostend-Dover ferry. I can sympathise. He eventually set his ambitions on an Antarctic expedition. The region was relatively unexplored, and at that time was mostly only visited by whaling and sealing vessels. He saw the opportunity to put his name on the map, and for all his faults he was right about that because his name and that of his crew are all over the peninsula. He acquired a ship and named it The Belgica.
Getting funding for the expedition was difficult enough, but he also struggled to crew it. Of the crew he could hire, some turned out to be so incompetent or mutinous that he fired them in South America before embarking to Antarctica.
There were some notable people in his crew however, the foremost being a young Roald Amundsen. He was there to gain experience in polar exploration to help him achieve his dream of reaching the North Pole. His eventual conquest of the South Pole was also part of that experience. His heart was set on being the first to the North Pole, something that would leave him embittered in later years despite all he had actually achieved.
The other notable person was the ship's doctor, Frederick Cook. Cook left his practice in New York to join the expedition. He had previously been the surgeon on Robert Peary's Arctic expedition of 1891–1892, a connection that would become significant later in his life. He was a man with grand ideas, many of which got him into significant trouble, including seven years in prison for his involvement in dodgy oil company promotions. He was pardoned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and the whole affair is, from this end of the lens of time, best described as murky.
The Belgica encountered two tragedies. Three if you count its cat. The first was the death of able seaman Carl Wiencke. During a storm Wiencke was swept off the deck and into the roiling sea. A desperate effort was made to save him, but eventually the rest of the crew realised they were attempting to rescue a corpse. It was a grim foreshadowing of the hardships that would follow, as the Belgica became trapped in the ice in the Bellingshausen Sea.
How this happened is a bone of contention. At this point in time nobody had overwintered in Antarctica, so to be the first people to do so would be something of a historic coup. It's very likely that de Gerlache sailed into the sea ice with the intention of becoming trapped. He may even have been encouraged in this by Amundsen, who also harboured dangerous ambitions. However this wasn't what the crew had signed up for, and furthermore the ship was badly prepared for such an eventuality.
Things were compounded when the crew succumbed to scurvy. You may be forgiven for thinking that by this time scurvy was a solved problem, but over the years there had been a move from lemons to cheaper limes. Limes have less vitamin C than lemons, but this deficiency wasn't noticed that much because over the same period steam power had made ships much faster. The upshot of this was that most routine naval voyages weren't long enough for sailors drinking lime juice to develop scurvy. Being trapped over an Antarctic winter with only canned goods for sustenance was however an entirely different matter.
The crew grew iller, and with their situation deteriorating some began to lose their grip on reality. They were only saved when Dr Cook insisted they defrost the penguin specimens they had collected in happier times and ration their meat to everyone on board. That vitamin C was the crucial element was not yet discovered, so this was an excellent intuition on Cook's part.
Which brings us to the second tragedy of the expedition, which was the death of poor Danco. He died over a prolonged period of heart failure, something which affected a number of polar explorers and is now understood to be likely caused by vitamin B1 deficiency. Compounded with scurvy the outlook was not good. His death was especially hard on the rest of the crew because it cemented the notion that their circumstances were inescapable. Anyway, he now has an island named after him, and I can report that it’s very nice. I wouldn't mind having a nice island named after me, although there is the Lambert Glacier on the other side of the continent, which is the world's largest glacier. It's not named after me, but between that and Daniel Lambert, once the world's fattest man, I should lay off the biscuits for a while.
I mentioned Cook's relation to Peary earlier. Both men went on to attempt to reach the North Pole. Both men claimed to have achieved this, much to the dismay of Amundsen, who had wanted that above all else. Both claims have been discredited one way or another. Peary's claim was in 1908 and Cook's a year later, but the next claims wouldn't be until 1926 when Richard E Byrd (who had his own amazing Antarctic adventures) flew over the North Pole in an aeroplane. A mere three days later Amundsen also flew over the North Pole in an airship. The punchline to this long parade north? Byrd's records of his journey have since been discredited and on balance it would appear that even though he didn't know this in his lifetime, Amundsen was actually the first to the North Pole.
The final business here is the third tragedy, which is that of Nansen the cat. Named after the polar explorer Fridjof Nansen, this was a rare case of something named after an explorer dying instead of something being named after a dead explorer. Nansen was a beloved and friendly character around the ship, but when they became locked in the ice it too became enveloped by the changed mood on the ship. It started growling at the crew, retreated from them and eventually died. It wouldn't have been scurvy because cats produce their own vitamin C, but it could have been some other kind of deficiency.
A dead cat's a bit of a bummer to end on but here we are. I hope you found this potted history interesting. Next week there will be penguins.
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