The Belgian Antarctic Expedition (1897--9)

penguin_starborn
2018-08-08T18:31:47Z

This was the first expedition of the Heroic Age, organized by Adrian de Gerlache, and funded by King Leopold's image problems. de Gerlache was a restless man of thirty, his life oscillating between breathtaking daring and breathtaking mundanity --- a man of the Belgian Navy, working on the fishery protection detail, then a seaman on an English vessel, failing to round Cape Horn and ending up on a scrapyard in Montevideo; an officer on a ferry between the prosaic Ostend and the boring Dover; then writing a flurry of letters, petitioning for a chance to go to Africa with Stanley, to the Arctic with Nordenskiöld, to anywhere with the Royal Geographic Society of Britain. Finally, a plea to the Geographic Society of his native land drew flame, a ship was purchased (MV Belgica), and funding was secured from the king. de Gerlache's crew included more than just Belgians; among others, the Norwegian 25-year-old first mate Roald Amundsen, destined for later fame, and the 26-year-old Pole Henryk Arctowski, a later authority on meteorology, who was much teased for his overappropriate name.

Belgica sailed south by the way of South America, where their reception was warm, the local scientists were enthused, all seemed well.

In truth, they were sailing into a world they knew very little of, into an implacably hostile world, and they were ill equipped for it. They reached Graham Land --- the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula --- in the January of 1898, skirting west between the peninsula and the islands flanking it --- not knowing if what they took for the farthest tip of the continent was just another archipelago, kitted together with glaciers and pack ice. The same month a sailor was washed overboard and lost.

In February they crossed the Antarctic Circle --- they sailed down the western side of the Peninsula, mapping and observing the flora and the fauna and for the lack of them, the stars and the moon. They tried to find a peninsula-breaching passage to the east side, the Weddell Sea, for their return --- and on the 28th of February, 1898, towards the end of the Antarctic summer, they got stuck in ice.

Some say this was an accident; some say this was on purpose: a ploy of de Gerlache or (say) the first mate Amundsen, to gain additional glory or experience.

If it was done on purpose, it nearly killed them all.

They would be stuck for over ten months, including two months of total darkness --- when Belgium sees the middle of summer, the Antarctic sinks to polar night.

They were unprepared: they piled on all their clothing, and it still wasn't enough to shelter them outside the ship. They had nothing to do: there was nothing but cold, darkness and death outside the ship; inside, the same hateful faces, the same ``three books and four issues of a magazine, a Bible and the mandolin that Amundsen tossed onto the ice by mid-March''. They did not have enough food: it was necessary to supplement it, but the choices were low. An officer by the name of Danco fell ill and died in June, raving that the others should promise to not eat him. A Belgian sailor went mad and walked out, shouting he was going to return to Belgium by foot --- he was not seen again, though several others claimed, for months, to hear him shouting outside, inviting them to join him. One more sailor did.

There weren't breaks in the ice to allow fishing; the nearest open water was (they thought) tens of miles away.

They had prepared, as best as they could, before all the horrors of the winter set in. In February, when the ship was still sailing, they had killed dozens of penguins, and harvested their meat for eating, storing it in the cold of the ship's open deck.

The meat might have been better fresh, but de Gerlache tasted it, and ordered the cook to not serve a gram of the disgusting slop to anyone. He didn't know the superstitious cook had adulterated the meat with soap and sand, spurred to this deception by the dream he had had of the birds talking like men, no doubt disturbed by how they already walked like men.

By midwinter, the men were ill of scurvy --- the lack of vitamin C, which first manifests as lassitude, weakness and soreness of limbs, and then goes to bleeding gums, falling teeth and other terrifyingly general symptoms. What's worse, at the time ``vitamin'' was an uninvented word; the two easy sources of it, vegetables and fresh meat, were not widely understood. de Gerlache was seriously ill by this point, writing his will, staring out his frost-encrusted window for hours at a time, willing the mountains of ice to move, at times twitching as if they did, and then shaking his head, knowing better.

Georges Lecointe, the ship's captain, was similarly ill; on his orders, the penguin meat had been dumped off the ship, and only its encasement in ice had kept it from being thrown in the waters. Lecointe stalked the ship, asking the crew strange questions --- later accounts have said he suspected some had been substituted with treasonous penguins, intent on sabotage, but this is likely nothing but malign rumors.

With de Gerlache and Lecointe so distracted, the first mate Roald Amundsen and the ship's doctor, Frederick Cook, acted. Cook had been with Peary in the Arctic,(footnote) and so knew fresh meat was the key against scurvy --- there weren't too many vegetables to be found in the Arctic --- so they walked round the ship, cracking piles of snow to find the piles and bundles of penguin meat.

(footnote: Indeed, Cook had claimed to have reached the North Pole with Peary (1909) and by himself (1908); neither claim stood against the scrutiny of outsiders. To read Cook's account of the Belgian Expedition is to come away thinking Amundsen hardly did anything; this is a constant pattern in Cook's accounts of his life and supposed deeds.)

This meat was of course no longer fresh --- it had been frozen for months. But it was good enough for a while.

With the cook now abandoning superstition in the face of survival, the meat was cooked and proved if not tasty, then at least edible. When it was served to de Gerlache, he did not ask what it was; when it was served to Lecointe, he said ``Is this penguin?'', and on being said so, cried out, made the sign of the Cross, muttered a few confused words on the state of his soul, and ate.

Thus empowered and restored, the crew organized a hunting party, with de Gerlache taking the lead. They marched thirty terrifying miles over the hills and valleys of creaking midwinter ice, in full darkness, the sun gone for weeks (and to be gone for still more weeks), until they found the edge of open water, and a small colony of penguins.

They fell among the birds with rifles, pistols, swords, cudgels, nets, gloved fists. In a fury of survival and hunger they slaughtered the birds, clubbing and striking them one after another, their beards stiff with frozen drool. The snow acquired a crimson hue; their cries were as harsh, bestial and varied as those of the doomed birds.

Adrien de Gerlache, the man of ups and downs, the noble-featured and mild-mannered Belgian officer, was the first among them, a demon with a saber and a pistol, his face and chest caked with diamonds of red frozen blood and penguin gore.

After the massacre was done, they tied the dead birds together into lines, fifteen to each, and then dragged, through the moaning winds of the unceasing darkness, them back to the ship.

de Gerlache himself fainted after the killing; the blood on his face and down it was from a copious nosebleed occasioned by the harsh environment and the monstrous occasion. Before falling down --- to be dragged back to the ship, just like his prey --- he raised his saber at the even deeper blackness of the open waters, and cried: ``Come, beast! We killed these --- we will kill you too! No matter how big --- we will kill mountains!''

The expedition lived on penguin meat and their official provisions for the rest of the winter. Boredom and the stresses of the alien environment continued to haunt them, and many felt guilty for their slaughter of the penguins --- or rather, haunted by it. Many mention in their memoirs the odd noiselessness of the battle, the utter surrender of the enemy, the terrible frenzy that overcame the men, as they ran from bird to bird, striking them down, crippling, stopping, slashing and crushing, then finally eliciting the discordant caws and croaks and cries the birds made --- the way they killed so many, and the way the rest slipped, like shadows, into the waters without as much as a ripple. One memoir, no doubt inspired by de Gerlache's ravings, mentions seeing a vast shape out in the water, a black iceberg that slipped underwater as the last bird quorked its last. But most of the memoir-writers wrote nothing of this all, choosing to imply a much more sanitized narrative of fresh meat.

Eventually spring came; the season of autumn in the northern world.

By January 1899 the ship was still stuck.

The ice was over two meters thick. There was open water, half a mile away, but it was not getting any closer --- and January was the height of Antarctic summer, meaning the halfway point!

Desperate to escape another winter in the ice --- and another war in search of meat --- they took to the ship's tools, and laid dynamite on the ice with drills and axes. The first explosions but warped the ice, and nearly crushed the ship's hull. The men attacked the ice with mattocks and hammers; some of the tools broke, their frozen nature no match for the native ice. A hammer's head famously shattered on the first blow, and a flying iron shard cut a line in Amundsen's cheek.

de Gerlache fell into a deep depression, and retreated to his cabin; around this time he covered its window with bootblack, and kept it so closed for the remainder of the expedition, referring to the view as ``the black mountain''.

In the meanwhile, Amundsen took control of the crew, and laid explosives right in front of the ship's keel. The blast rocked the ship and had the incensed captain Lecointe nearly shoot the first mate; but it had made for open water at the front, and with the ship's weight and the endless application of manual tools, the crew was ever so slowly able to move the ship forward. After two weeks of nonstop day-and-night work, they were in open water, the ice closing after them as if nothing had ever been there, and nothing had passed through.

It took them another month --- the last half of February and the first of March --- to navigate another six miles of the iceberg- and ice floe-choked water. By then the summer was over; the floes were knitting together into the impassable dead plateau of lengthy winter. But by the 14th of March, they were out of the ice, onto open water, and they immediately headed north, away.

The Belgian Expedition reached 71 degrees 30 seconds south. One degree of longitude is approximately 69 miles, and as the Pole is full 90 degrees south, the Pole was still some 1280 miles away.

Despite its name, the Belgian Expedition was the most multinational and, in a way, least greedy of the expeditions of the Heroic Age. Those that followed de Gerlache were much more conscious of the double glory they sought --- not just for themselves, but for their country.

As for de Gerlache, he did not return to the Antarctic. He joined Charcot's 1903 expedition, but left before it reached the Antarctic; he cited quarrels within the expedition, and others let understand he had suffered a major breakdown at seeing something vast and dark out in the ocean.

So lately I've been working on a chatty, digressive pseudo-non-fiction book that's 80% true facts about Antarctica, suggestively arranged, 15% amazingly truth-like lies about Antarctica, and couched in those two, 5% increasingly loopy lies about the sleeping penguin-faced menace that's waking up from beneath the Antarctic ice, any day now, because we made forbidden pacts with the quorking, cawing, tux-clad guardians of the Last Continent.

Ahem yeah high-quality discussion. What's the strangest creative project you've stumbled into, or thought of?

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