II A Drake’s Passage
Sfx – Footsteps up steel ladder and onto deck waves and wind… #12 track 1.
Though South America runs out of ground in Tierra del Fuego, the mountains of the Andes Cordillera do not end there. Rather, they slip beneath the waves of the Southern Ocean, on a serpentine route, rising at last from the frigid depths as the beckoning finger of the Antarctic Peninsula: sun-blanched, ice-glazed, hardened by winter and polished in the katabatic winds.
Between the two continents lies a passage as unpredictable as its namesake, Sir Francis Drake. This farmer’s son became the first captain to circumnavigate the world in his own ship – Magellan being slain in the course of his voyage. With Queen Elizabeth’s blessings to, quote, “impeach the provisions” of the Spanish crown, Drake earned all of England’s praises with his ruthless actions. To the Spaniards he was the diabolical “Drah-kay”, and as one Spanish ambassador to England remarked, he was “the master-thief of the unknown world.”
Seafarers, in particular, hold The Drake with a great and abiding respect; its most infamous feature is Cape Horn. Here the clash of oceans and bitter Antarctic storms conspire in a graveyard of ships and crews. This is the route of our tall sailing ship Europa – across The Drake, bound for the Antarctic coast.
Sfx – waves and sails Sfx- On deck >> 0;42 “The sheet is okay?” “It’s good?” >> 1;19 Sails filling as being hoisted (some wind tear) sail luffing at 1;44, still hoisting at 2;03 >2;16 “Good.” #12 track 7-
Of these latitudes the old sailors’ said, “Below forty degrees there is no law; below fifty degrees there is no God.” At midnight of our first day out of Tierra del Fuego, Captain Klaas Gaastra logs Europa’s position: Fifty-five degrees – fifteen minutes South.
The Drake asserts its bold reputation: relentless Force 9 seas roll the ship; seasickness claims its victims among the amateur crew. There are three stages to mal de mer: first you think you will die; then you hope you will die. In the last stage you are afraid you might not die.
Midway through the first watch, at two AM, the fore lower topsail sheet – a sturdy stainless steel chain with links six millimeters thick – suddenly parts with an explosive bang. Unfettered, the sail flogs mightily as Klaas calls “all hands” who, sleeping warm in their bunks only moments before, rush on deck to haul away at the sail’s lines to save it from the claw of the gale. Seawater bursts through the freeing ports, waves pour green over the rails then race foaming across the rolling deck. We are, at times, knee deep in churning ice water.
Sfx waves on deck
The violence wreaked upon the ship and sea is sobering as the flailing sails shake the yard and mast. Climbing aloft on the bucking rigging, the sea-sprayed shrouds freeze and seem to burn our hands; heavy sea boots slip. Halfway up the reeling hundred-foot mast we step out onto the footropes strung beneath the yards and edge out sidewise along the yard to spiral rope “gaskets” around the sails and still them from the storm. The wind aloft is a terrible force – with will and weight – unimpressed by our efforts.
“One hand for yourself, and one hand for the ship” is the sailors’ rule, but two hands are required as the sails’ gale-filled bellies balloon in our arms, beating our legs and hammering at our feet. In a matter of moments the canvas is tattered and whipping at our hands and faces; the thick edge roping is beaten to bits – disintegrated in places; the stricken sail is literally beating the life from itself while we hang on, trying not be thrown or blown from our slick and tenuous perch.
Far below, the bow wave caroms foam into the darkness from which endless white-crested rollers run in to lift and roll the ship like maddened creatures writhing beneath our keel. Of such a night Herman Melville wrote, “In circumstances like these, the sense of fear is annihilated in the unutterable sights that fill the eye and sounds that fill the ear.”
With sails secured at last, we “lay below” to spend the remainder of the night in the deckhouse, asleep in wet gear and sea boots, ready in a moment’s notice. This is what we expected from The Drake… and we have come away easy.
(4:45)
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II B – South Shetlands
Europa’s first Antarctic anchorage is in the South Shetland Islands, above the tip of peninsula. The waves here are spiked and rushing, whorls of up-welling current poultice the surface – a reminder me of Scotland’s Corryvwrecken Whirlpool. Elephant Island, where Sir Ernest Shackleton’s men waited five bleak months for their rescue, is but 200 miles to the east.
Snowflakes as big as coins drift down, collecting on deck and in the rope coils. The sea has long downy furrows of drifting feathers from the penguin chicks’ molt into young adulthood. Near the ship penguins float and bob as if inflated, glancing up and around then quickly dipping their heads in search of the next tasty morsel.
Our impression is of indescribable desolation, but the stark beauty awes us. Icebergs ride in astonishing whiteness and islands shoulder the swells like black granite galleons, snow-dusted and pushing into soft, polishing clouds. Dark beaches soar into cliffs and broad hillsides splashed with rust-yellow lichens and soft mats of intense green mosses.
Sfx – Penguins continues…#1 track 8
Tens of thousands of chinstraps, gentoo and a very few rockhopper penguins with their spiky colored head feathers reside here, staking their claims on small depressions in the cold stones. As with all penguin rookeries, we smell it long before we see it – penguin poop is an impressive calling card.
Sfx – penguins continues…#1 track 8
The beach is a running comedy show – the penguins protest every insult – real or imagined. With wings spread and pink-orange feet pumping, feathered trespassers are pursued on zigzag, full-tilt tours of the rookery, like a Charlie Chaplin chase scene. Others seem deep in thought and, head down, seem to study each earnest footfall. Chicks clamber to be fed, prompting parents with rapidly nodding beaks. The parents squawk in return as they work up yet another gutful of fish and krill to regurgitate into eager throats. The bedlam is complete.
Sfx – penguins continues…#1 track 8
Humans seem well accepted; some penguins ignore us altogether. Interested in our appearance – it’s our freakish long legs, I presume – the implausibly proper looking penguins waddle amongst our party until we are surrounded. The fledging chicks, with straggly, grey feathers and a geeky overall appearance, seem to be the only ones, besides ourselves, who also were not informed of the formal dress code. Overused or not, the tuxedoed penguin angle is tough to avoid in the face of so much refined haberdashery. The adults look as shipwrecked partygoers busy sorting out the guests from the waiters with all squabbling over non-existent seating protocols.
Sfx – penguins continues… #1 track 8
My microphone’s large wind cover is made of long, soft-grey fuzz, the very size and colour of a fledging chick, and inquisitive penguins gather to inspect this contraption. Some seem quite perplexed and shy while others, due to my furry windsock, seem to feel that we are friends of a friend, as it were. They inch ever closer until their curiosities are satisfied. For most this requires a desultory poke in the pants and the pecking of shoes.
Sfx- Penguins churring – sea lions barking, elephant seals snorting – (1:35) good of both – sea lion 2:00/2:45/3:08/4:16#1 track 11
Near a field of shore-washed brash ice, a pod of elephant seals flop on the beach. The picture of low stress lifestyle, these behemoths lounge atop one another in a crush, scratching their own and one another’s heads and hides with surprisingly adroit flippers. Males may be four meters in girth and weigh-in at four tons. Like obese, furry schoolboys they compete in explosive belching, energetic nose-clearing and alarmingly effective flatulence. The females, at three meters in length and only one ton in weight seem, comparatively, quite svelte.
Sfx – Water dipping, brushing boots, on deck sounds…
Back on deck we set out tubs and brushes to scrub the boots of penguin poop, and after dinner we pull the hook to steam south overnight through Bransfield Strait. It is quite cold on deck as we keep watch for icebergs and submerged ice growlers. Large rafts of shuga ice bits form large swirls in the currents, clicking and popping. Though under heavy overcast the sky never fully darkens, leaving on the horizon a strange, chrome ribbon of the light that stays with us through the night.
Sfx – Ice “glispering
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II C – Deception Island
Sfx – Wind and waves
With morning’s light we fetch the volcanic Deception Island, negotiating the tricky winds and currents past Pete’s Pinnacle and threading the narrow entrance of Neptune’s Bellows and into the vast sea-filled caldera bay beyond. This floor of the interior bay is a cone and so is steep with lava sand sides. As such it is bad holding ground for anchors and we put out the hook with five shackles of chain and the hopes that it will hold all night. Sfx – #7 Track 7Klaas on intercom “Let go anchor” and anchor lets out strong at first then weakens and continues through :48 / Intercom :59 more chain goes out to 1;38 bell rings – intercom Eef “ yea, fast.” / bkgrnd engine fades
Such is the bleakness here that the only thing living are smears of lichens on the black-brown lava walls; the only thing moving is the muddy sluice from the mountains that veins the clay coloured marl of the floodplain below.
Seasonal whalers settled the island for a time, abandoning the station at Whaler’s Bay to the collapse of the industry. A subsequent English research station was prudently evacuated in the face of a major volcanic eruption thirty years ago. The relict buildings are vacant, bleached and busted, desolate yet strangely compelling, the floors covered with ash and black, broken lava. A forlorn wood-fired cook stove rusts openly in a kitchen with no roof or walls. Freeze-ruptured food tins line kitchen shelves still, the dry climate having long ago sucked the moisture from them.
Hulking round storage tanks, three stories tall, stand canted and listing, oxidizing slowly away to nothing. Near a hangar around the bay stands an airplane, wingless and abandoned, its runway made useless in the wrath of the volcano. Not far from the storage tanks at the foot of the mountain birds bathe, splashing and shivering their feathers in a quiet green pond in the somber earth. The dark slope behind is velveted with a rich moss. A large skua preens atop one of a series of large decaying iron hoops that protrude from the green water – the skeletal rusting ribs of the industry that died here.
In the afternoon we haul up anchor for Deception’s Pendulum Point, famous for the geo-thermally heated waters that stream from the black lava beach into the bay. It seems rather odd to be stripping off layers of clothes beneath the bleak, snow-strewn mountainsides for a hot bath – an anomaly here in frozen Antarctica – but an eager group goes ashore to shovel a spot into the hot sand shore. – Sfx – #3 track 3 Lots of chatter… @“You have to find a balance between cold and hot.” The hard part, of course, is getting dressed in the icy onshore wind.
Sfx – #3 track 3 …Edit discovering a series of too-hot waters… (2:350“Aahh… Oohhh… Aaahhh!” and group laughing.
The hard part, of course, is getting dressed in the icy onshore wind.
The water is fiercely hot in places, a reminder that this is an active volcano. Chill breezes sweep great banks of steam along the blackened shoreline, softening the terrain of oxidized crags and barren mounts, ice spackled and drawn against a blank white frozen sky. This is that cold day in hell one sometimes hears mentioned. Deep in the earth the heat and pressure gather irrepressibly as Deception Island awaits its next big play.
Sfx – people talking at the beach
(3:20).
