the times | Saturday December 18 2021 saturday review 17
prisoners of perpetual dark, with mirages
so common they learnt not to trust their
eyes. Suspended in torturous insomnia,
tormented by the squeaking of the multi-
plying rats, the groaning of the ship, the
roar and crack of moving ice, and unex-
plained screams, Lieutenant Danco died
of heart failure and another crew member
went mad, announcing that he was “going
back to Belgium”.
With their limbs ballooning, the
crew retired into a listlessness
dubbed “polar anaemia” by Cook,
who didn’t want to frighten them.
He might have been a morally
dodgy Yankee with a suspect gold
smile, but he knew scurvy when he
saw it. Their bottled lime juice had
oxidised.
Cook knew that they could only
get vitamin C from eating raw
penguin or seal. De Gerlache said
that he’d rather die. His crew
agreed. Only Amundsen heeded.
He got better very quickly. Now
he and Cook were the only
able-bodied, able-minded ones.
Leaving their incapacitated col-
leagues languishing in their soul-
withering fears and rat-invaded
beds, Cook and Amundsen
snatched brief ski trips beyond
the stinking welter of animal
carcasses, tin cans and human
sewage surrounding the ship.
Consciously they decided on
positive thinking: “We will come
out of this with our mental mag-
azines armed with brain buckshot.” Cook
planned a utopian “New Ark Project”, a
redistribution of the world’s animal popu-
lation to provide a better balanced food
supply for humankind. To fund this he
would harvest and sell Antarctica’s pen-
guin guano for agricultural fertiliser.Madhouse
at the End
of the Earth
The Belgica’s
Journey into the
Dark Antarctic
Night
by Julian SanctonWH Allen, 368pp; £20Sailing into scurvy and insanity
I
n 1897 the Belgian Antarctic Expedi-
tion set out to conquer Antarctica
under the leadership of the young
Belgian aristocrat Baron de Gerlache.
Innocent of polar conditions, he had
never learnt to swim. Neither a linguist nor
a great judge of men, he assembled a multi-
national crew of 20, including a “sailor”
who had never been to sea, a dangerously
incompetent mechanic and a cook so culi-
narily inept that his “soups full of mystery
and embalmed meats” gave all the crew
scurvy and killed one or two.
Fortunately, a young Norwegian named
Roald Amundsen volunteered to join,
unpaid. This was his first expedition. He
could ski. He had trained in the Arctic. He
spoke Norwegian, English and German.
Now he taught himself French and Flem-
ish. Amundsen would be the Babel fish, the
only person able to communicate with
everyone on board.
Leaving Antwerp, the Belgica twice
broke down before reaching the open
sea. Crossing the Atlantic, the Belgians
refused to take orders from Norwegians
(step in, multilingual Amundsen).
Reaching Punta Arenas in
Chile, the insubordinate crew
went on the razzle. A shootout
on board was quelled by
Amundsen, de Gerlache and the
captain, reinforced by local
police. The ship at last acquired
a doctor, Frederick Cook. His
shipmates described him as a
typical Yankee, with gold teeth
and a fur coat. He understood
only English — hardly ideal
during medical consultations.
As the ship steamed south,
freezing hurricanes whipped the
sea into writhing mountain
ranges. Contemporary scientific
thinking advocated calming
waves by dripping oil into the
ocean. They dripped, to little avail.
Their youngest, a Norwegian cab-
in boy named Wiencke, was swept
overboard. “He always wanted to
go out on deck without a rope
round his waist,” Amundsen wrote
mournfully. “I always had to call
him back.” All were haunted by wit-
nessing Wiencke’s terrible death.
Ice can destroy a ship as a boa
constrictor destroys its prey, crushing its
bones and swallowing it whole. In Februa-
ry 1898 the ship became iced in. Realising
that their lives depended entirely on the
whim of the Antarctic ice pack, the men’s
minds became unmoored. They becameAmundsen’s plans were less messianic.
He concentrated on perfecting equipment
to cope with polar conditions — better
sledges, clothing, tents based on wind-
resistant shapes: cylinders and cones.
The captain nearly died of scurvy.
Shaken up, the rest (antivaxers?), revised
their principles — even de Gerlache. Raw
meat brought them back from the nearly
dead, but two had gone mad.
Iced in through spring and summer
1898, the ship was buried by 25 days of
snow in October. In November she sprung
a leak. Their second Christmas on board
ended in mass food poisoning. Half a mile
away open water was seen, and it was now
or never. Cook devised a plan to dig a chan-
nel. The exhausted men set to the super-
human task, sawing round the clock,
removing chunks half the size of a football
pitch, each weighing more than the Belgi-
ca. Hauling the great ice blocks, they sang
the Song of the Volga Boatmen. Three days
away from completion the ice moved,
snapping the canal shut. Weirdly, in Febru-
ary, it reopened. Hanging penguin car-
casses as fenders, with one desperate
charge, they were free.
The expedition had neither discovered
the magnetic pole, nor whether Antarctica
was a land continent or merely frozen sea.Nevertheless, de Gerlache sailed home to
a hero’s welcome. He remained sick, se-
verely weakened by scurvy, probably aug-
mented by the fumes from the prussic acid
used to euthanise animal specimens (it
would become the chief ingredient of
Zyklon B, the Nazis’ death gas).
Amundsen used his Belgica experience
to become the first man to navigate the
Northwest Passage and to reach the South
Pole, using rat-free ships whose Falstaffian
kitchens produced apparently delicious
anti-scorbutic seal stews.
Of Cook, The New York Times wrote:
“He will count forever among the greatest
impostors of the world.” First he stole
someone else’s book and published it
under his own name. Next he claimed to
have summited Denali, the highest moun-
tain in the US, and also to be the first man
to reach the North Pole. When both claims
were disproved, he devised a Ponzi scheme
trading in oil shares that fetched him
nearly 15 years in prison. Amundsen was
the only one to visit him there. The Belgi-
ca, cleared of rats, became the pleasure
craft of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, pretender
to the French throne.
The story of the Belgica has been told
before, but never so brilliantly. Madhouse at
the End of the Earth belongs at the heights
of polar literature: horror stories that in-
clude Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner, Jules Verne’s novel
Le Sphinx des glaces, a favourite with de
Gerlache, who took to referring to the Ant-
arctic as a sphinx, and Edgar Allan Poe’s
uber-macabre The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Charles Baude-
laire’s translation of which was on board
the Belgica. All probe the link between
polar exploration and insanity, presenting
the idea that the end of the Earth is a for-
bidden, sacred place whose trespass spells
humanity’s and the planet’s doom.Sue Prideaux admires
a vivid retelling
of the many horrors
of an Antarctic
expedition in 1897
frozen horror
The Belgica stuck in ice,
c 1897. Below: Roald
AmundsenM a o T J D N b W
savings in a pyramid scheme. Civil war
breaks out. A boat carrying 100 Albanian
refugees is hit by an Italian military vessel
and goes under. Ypi leaves for Italy, where
her mother is working as a cleaner, and
never returns.
Ypi is a professor of political theory at
the London School of Economics, where
she specialises in Marxism. Her family are
not delighted. Her mother quotes a cousin
saying that her grandfather did not spend
15 years locked up so that she could leave
Albania to defend socialism.
Still, as Ypi points out, her family’s story
illustrates one of Marx’s most powerful
perceptions: that people are the product of
social relations for which they are not
responsible. She and her parents lived “in
the same place, but in different worlds.
These worlds overlapped only briefly;
when they did, we saw things through dif-
ferent eyes.” Her parents equated socialism
with “the denial of who they wanted to
be... I equated liberalism with broken
promises, the destruction of solidarity, the
right to inherit privilege, turning a blind
eye to injustice.”
Having lived in a country that was
turned upside down overnight, she under-
stands how easily institutions can collapse.
“When you see a system change once, it’s
not that difficult to believe that it can
change again.” Political systems that seem
permanent can prove fragile. The citizens
of western democracies would do well to
remember that.
Raw meat brought
them back from the
nearly dead, but two
had gone mad
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