Port Lockroy

by | Apr 19, 2001 | Read, Listen, See, Antarctic Tall Ship Series

V A Port Lockroy

Sfx – #9 track 19 – The wind blowing very  – Conny talking to bridge from foredeck (1:29) Klaas talks back over intercom

Europa is cupped within a narrow bay, close under the lee of high ice cliffs of Weinke Island but, even here, the vicious Antarctic winds visit. The bay’s hard, rocky bottom offers precious little grip to our straining anchors. Deckhand Reinoud van der Heijden worries:

Sfx – #9 track 19 – Reinoud – “ On starboard side we have six shackles out and this is about 150 meters and, uh, we also put out the portside anchor on which we’ve got about five and a half shackles… five shackles out and we are pumping out the last ten meters … and that’s it.”

For the first time since being commissioned as a sailing ship, Europa has both bower anchors spread, veered almost to the bitter ends. In the night, in winds of Force 10 and 11, it seems we must drag the anchors and risk grounding, but with morning the wind moderates and, leaving a watch aboard, we go ashore. 

We land amidst a healthy rookery of gentoo penguins, a triangular splash of white feathers adorns each side of their black heads like sports logos. With their long beaks and bright feet, the penguins give the impression they are wearing ball caps and orange trainers with tuxedos – it’s as if we have landed amidst a formal event for diminutive music-film directors. They share their home in the cold, speckled stones with the least adapted of all Antarctic life – humans – for this is Port Lockroy, population 2. 

Resident Kenn Back greets us near the beach. His sincere smile beams from a sun burnished face beneath home-cut greying hair, his gaze at once direct and demure. He shares the beginning of his career in the South. 

#9 track 23 – Kenn – (Laughs) “I did, uh, classics at Sarum University – Latin and Greek – and had no experience at meteorology whatsoever, and when I arrived in London for the interview I was told… it went something like this …’Oh I see you’ve done a bit of Latin and Greek. Well, we need a weatherman down there.’ And the whole thing was over in two minutes and things were conducted in a different way thirty-five years ago.”

Now an Antarctic veteran, Kenn has spent ten winters among the British bases on the continent. Coverall sleeves rolled up, Kenn’s hard, knotted arms point out the tiny island’s highlights along the short track to the station.

Kenn“You see the chicks are all sheltering on the leeward side of the hut today… they’re not stupid.” Penguins in background. “I’m afraid our flag is starting to look a bit ragged. We’re hoping it will last the season.” Penguins. “The wind certainly is hard on the life of a flag here.” Walking over stones. “Over on this side you see a disused anemometer tower from when this was a weather station and some of the Texans who visit us think it’s an oil rig.” Laughs… Todd “Sad, but true, I am sure.” Kenn”The way forward for Antarctica.” Laughs. Walking into station. Rinus and Eef talking. Footsteps thru building…# 10 track 1

Originally a clandestine World War Two military operation, Port Lockroy started as Operation Tabarin, code-named after someone’s favourite Paris nightclub. The Allies believed, falsely, that Axis raids were launched from Antarctic harbours on ships rounding Cape Horn. The base was established and at war’s end science and exploration seemed to follow on naturally beyond any strategic motive. Kenn explains:

 “It’s the oldest British base in Antarctica, the oldest continuously occupied British base in Antarctica. Scott’s and Shackleton’s huts on the other side are much older but they were only lived in for the duration of the expedition one or two winters.” #9 track 22 @ (:)

Employees of the British non-profit agency Antarctic Heritage Trust, Kenn Back and Jim Fox will live here for the three months of austral summer, continuing the restoration of Port Lockroy. 

#9 track 23 @9:00? Kenn-“And you can see on the shelves here all these old wonderful tins dating from the late fifties or from 1960’s with the old labels and many of these firms are still going today, Peerstuff’s Custards and Porridge Oats, here, uh, names which you still see in the supermarkets today.” #9 track 23 @9:00?

Preserved here too, are Antarctic wintering clothes, pulling sledges, provisions boxes, communications gear and, in a reminder of that early, all-male era, when the average tour of duty was two and one half years, a full-length painting of Marilyn Monroe.

Eventually the Trust will reclaim several historic British bases as living museums. All possible proceeds are directed to site renovation, and Kenn happily explains away the woeful lack of even basic Antarctic life amenities such as plumbing, electricity and heat

Kenn – ”Yes, at the moment we are chipping bits of ice which we find washed up on the beach. 

Kenn – “So, we fill our buckets with our little ice axe and let them melt in the sun outside the hut and that’s once the brine has drained out after a couple of hours on the beach it is very good fresh water.” 

Kenn “ It’s actually warmer outside the hut than inside the hut on most days. Especially when the sun comes out. So the more effective melting is to leave the buckets outside. (laughs) It’s hard to believe, I know (laughs)” Kenn – We have paraffin Tilly lights for in the evening and they give out quite a bit of warmth so, we aren’t entirely without heating and we have a little gas cooker. So the person that’s cooking the evening meal also manages to warm the place up a bit.” 

…And the place needs a bit of warming. The all-time, high-recorded temperature in Port Lockroy is a mere 7.8 degrees Centigrade; the low is minus twenty-five.

But as Jim Fox, the other half of Lockroy’s population explains, that they come here not for comfort or personal gain. As with many paths in life, what they do have is based on what they don’t have… and don’t miss.

#10 track 13 @ apx 9;00? Jim – “ You haven’t got the media. You haven’t got news. You haven’t got people trying to rip you off – apart from in our shop. No! You haven’t got things like that. We don’t carry keys around we don’t lock doors, we don’t carry money around, we don’t have a wallet. You know, it’s just very, very simple.”

The shop Jim refers to is, actually, Her Majesty’s loneliest post office and T-shirt shop, and as such is the primary duty at Port Lockroy. In this warm season boats pass almost every day – some small yachts, some cruise ships – most all with mail for all points north. With their mail the boats often leave an abundance of welcome, and otherwise scarce, fresh fruit.

Jim – “…and my main job here is to look after the post office – it takes up a hell of a lot of my time. It takes about a day and a half to process the post off of one of the bigger ships we get.”

Jim “We’ll have about forty thousand pieces at the end of the year about forty thousand postcards by the end of the season.”

Todd “ That’s a lot”

Jim – “Yea it’s a lot. It’s a popular place. You know seven and a half thousand people her last year. Probably get between six and seven this year. Six and seven thousand.” 

Between melting ice, counting penguins, hand-cancelling mail and hosting visitors there is precious little time for the solitude many come here for as the volumes of language and study books left behind by predecessors reveal. 

Sfx – Hand-cancelling mail and lantern

Here at Port Lockroy, as with the Ukrainians we met at Vernadsky Base, we discover signs of the growing number of people who are captured by the raw draw of this inhospitable land. In 1909, after an arduous sledge journey south, Sir Douglas Mawson, Edgeworth David and Alistair Mackay, at last discovered the austral magnetic pole. Scientists now agree this pole to be gradually shifting with each passing year, as do the interests of those over the centuries who have come here, first for exploration and glory, then for the profits of seals and whales, and next in the annual migrations in the name of science. Now, inevitably, tourism succumbs to the pull, as the Great White Continent continues to attract man with its many brands of magnetism.

V B – Drake’s Passage and Cape Horn

Sfx – Stacking chain in the anchor locker. Windlass engine hammering

The wake-ups for heaving up anchor come early. Reinoud and I go below and wedge into the cramped narrows of the bow on the floor of the ship. The chain lockers are virtually empty – we have twelve shackles of chain in the water – each shackle is twenty-five meters in length and each weighs close to a ton. The heavy chains are hauled aboard by the windlass and then, via spill pipes, travel down through three decks, deep into the ship and into these steel plate bins.

Port side then starboard, the muddy, wet and freezing chain is in turn slowly pumped down to us in the dark. We must kneel on the chain in one locker to reach into and receive the wet and freezing chain in the adjoining locker, pushing and pulling, stacking the heavy chain neatly so it rides well in a heavy sea and is free to run when next needed. The windlass engine overhead whines and hammers; oily smoke forms a blue pall in the dank locker’s confines. Slowly the chain pile builds, one link at a time.  If the windlass slips the chain will rip back out of the locker, taking any thing or body it catches with it back up through the eight-inch wide pipe.

Sfx – Stacking chain in the anchor locker. 

Anchors housed, Europa turns from beneath the stone and ice-swirled skirts of the Seven Sisters Mountains and enters the Neumeyer Channel and the Drake Passage and beyond. This morning we heave up the anchor for the last time from Antarctic waters.

#6 track 7# – Weather fax (mixed with) #11 track 9 @ 3;2? Eef – “… so if we have to head back like this and we have a north-easterly wind first we can make some westing, and then definitely, the wind will turn to the west later on, as it usually does, and that makes it easier to turn back over there. The waypoint is going to be Cape Horn.”

In two days time we have crossed the Antarctic Convergence Zone; sea and air temperatures increase. We have less snow now, but stand watch still in bitter winds. Some who tend toward seasickness have not been seen for days, for the foul weather of the Drake is upon us. A rough sea is hardest on Marian and Anneka – one can always tell a ship’s cooks by the oven burns on their arms.

Day five brings us close on to Cape Horn – the fulcrum of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the infamous Everest of sailing. Currents and vicious storms make this passage sufficiently challenging that the thirty thousand lives expended in building the Panama Canal were deemed, apparently, a reasonable investment.  One historic Cape Horn chart is crowded by symbols of shipwrecks – score upon score of them – in red ink ranks, each vanquished vessel’s name neatly recorded beneath. But the vanished seamen’s names were known only to loved ones; these turbulent waters seem salted with their tears. 

Just ahead, coy for its wicked reputation, The Horn lies crouched behind a curtain of rain. But when the squall clears there is the rock, as impervious to the centuries of curses thrown against it as it is to the seething sea. Everyone is quietly jubilant – relieved even. Pinching closer until the rock fills our forward horizon, we fall off before the wind, setting the square sails. 

Aloft in the tops beneath the brow of Cape Horn we feel in the company of those who pioneered these waters and the means to sail them. And though we have lived up to no legends we are, technically, “Cape Horners” now. It’s not the exclusivity of the club I sense, but rather the inclusiveness for, in some small way, we now belong to a group of people reaching far into the history of a planet in search of itself, stretching limits of knowledge and endurance. Why did they come here, to the worst of the oceans’ offers and further still to the frozen Terra Incognita to the south? Why are we still fascinated by them? Better yet, why did we come here?

People want to go where they really shouldn’t be, it seems – ask any teenager. People aren’t having fun unless they’re a little scared – ask any carnival barker. And because so many of the early missions South were failures we apparently respect these men simply because they came and stuck it out and because it has been done – then and now – with such aplomb. And, maybe, we want to believe that in similar circumstances we could, and would, behave equally. Shackleton sorted the nearly 5,000 applicants for his fifty or so expedition jobs into three piles titled, “Mad,” “Hopeless,” and “Possible,” which, if you think about it, might describe any really good trip.

Sfx – Peter’s accordion in the deckhouse or the band Solan’s tune – Tommy Tarbukas

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