November 28 marks the 45th anniversary of the Erebus disaster. Matt Vance recounts journeys to the icy wasteland, including one with family representatives of those who died.
The first thing you notice upon arriving in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, is the mountain. It is as omnipresent as a portrait with eyes that follow you around the room. Even when buried in your sleeping bag in a blizzard, you know it is there, like some lodestone for your inner magnet. Perhaps it is because it is volcanic and constantly rumbles with a plume of wispy smoke, or perhaps because it is the tallest, darkest thing in a landscape that is dominated by white and the horizontal.
The mountain is named Erebus and it is backed up by Terror, its smaller, dormant twin to the west. Erebus is a conical volcanic mountain with gently sloping flanks. At first glimpse, it seems like you could wander up it in an afternoon ramble. In reality, it is a five-day climb over treacherous crevasses and icefalls. It is a mountain full of tricks, one minute Dr Jekyll, the next, Mr Hyde.
In 1841, James Clark Ross named these twin mountains after expedition ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror (The Ross Expedition of 1839 – 1843, led by Ross, discovered the ice shelf and explored the sea that now bears his name). In Greek mythology, Erebus was one of the primordial deities born out of the void of Chaos. Erebus personified darkness and was also said to be a transition zone between Earth and Hades. It was an odd thing to name a ship after, and the darkness of the name seems to have spread to the mountain.
In fact, HMS Erebus met a horrible end. It and HMS Terror were fitted with small steam engines and used in John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to traverse the last un-navigated section of the famed Northwest Passage in the Arctic. The ships became trapped in ice off King William Island, forcing the expedition to attempt self-rescue on foot. While they survived for months or maybe years, the crew endured a wretched end of starvation, madness and suspected cannibalism.
The story of the expedition’s disappearance became one of the world’s great mysteries. Large sums of money and resources were thrown at discovering the men’s fate, and it was only in 2014 that the wreck of the Erebus was discovered on the floor of the Queen Maud Gulf by a Canadian research ship using hi-tech sonar.
Guiding lights
It must have been something about this Hades business that infected the communal perception of the mountain at New Zealand’s Scott Base. Around the comfortable corridors of the base, the field guides are a privileged subculture. Unlike chefs and mechanics, they get to go places. They are forever heading out with science teams to places very few ever see. Most of them are mountain guides in their other lives, but in Antarctica, they have traded vertical challenges for the horizontal. Strangely enough, when presented with the opportunity to get vertical and guide researchers up Mt Erebus, their enthusiasm seems to evaporate. When I quiz them about it, most just shrug their shoulders and stare hard at their expensive cross-trainers.
“It’s a godawful mountain,” says Stu, our guide. It is as close to an admission as I have come. Stu is to be our field guide for an ascent of Mt Erebus the easy way. We are to fly up by helicopter to just below the summit, where we will drop some supplies to a party studying the life forms around the fumaroles, or volcanic vents, that dot the rim of mountain.
I sit next to Rob, a pilot who is one of the best in the business and has the demeanour of a hard-bitten Antarctic veteran. The Bell 212 helicopter labours up the mountain, tacking like a yacht to gain altitude.
Near the top, the air is thin and approaching the limit of where a chopper can go. The mountain is like a wall in front of us, with large crevasses rupturing the smooth surface of snow. We fly over some camps that look like dog droppings on a white carpet, and the remains of a crashed helicopter. “Been there since the 60s,” yells Stu over the intercom.
Rob, never the one for small talk, is even more focused as he looks for a suitable platform on which to let the chopper flop down. We land in a cloud of snow dust, and as the engine winds down, he still seems tense. “Right, if I say we need to go, you move your arse … got it?” he says. It is an order that is as clear as it is direct. Weather and visibility can change by the minute up here, and the thought of having to camp for a week and live on survival rations does not appeal to any of us.
The thin air at the top of Erebus has an immediate effect. Our breaths are long and gasping because we have had no time to acclimatise to the altitude. Stu keeps checking in with me: “We have the occasional one who keels over when we do this trip,” he says. “How are you feeling?” I nod and give the thumbs-up, yet I am as high as a kite, light-headed and drunk with the power of the mountain masquerading as altitude sickness. I pace around, lunging at my breathing, helping to unload some gear and saying hello to the scientists who are condemned to camp up here for a month. We are there for only a short time and I need no encouragement from Rob to “move my arse” when it is time to leave. I have a strong desire to get off this mountain.
From out on the Ross Ice Shelf, the mountain never seems to shrink; it is always there, looking like a cartoon of a mountain. Author Robert Macfarlane wrote, “Without doubt, it is these harmless-looking conical mountains that have killed the most in human history.” This mountain is no different.
The north side hides a kilometres-long scar that contains the wreckage of Air New Zealand’s flight TE901, which ploughed into Mt Erebus on a sightseeing trip from Auckland to McMurdo Sound on November 28, 1979. In this one violent moment, more Kiwis died in Antarctica than any other nationality. The scar on the mountain also cut through a generation of New Zealanders who now associate the name with a personal kind of horror. In a landscape where the cold has nullified any sense of smell, it has imbued this mountain with tapu strong enough to taste.
After the crash, the predecessors of these young field guides were sent to look for survivors and with the aid of the NZ Police, to conduct the grisly job of body recovery on the mountain. This is why I have been quizzing the field trainers and perhaps why I felt uncomfortable on the mountain.
The Erebus disaster is New Zealand’s version of the “Scott expedition”, the pioneering adventure that ended in the deaths of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four of his best men on their unsuccessful attempt to be first to the Geographic South Pole in 1912. Erebus is a name that New Zealanders of a certain generation will never forget. It has become part of a cultural landscape of fear.
Anniversary flight
A few years after my first trip up Mt Erebus, I was part of the communications team involved in a series of events to commemorate 30 years since the disaster. A dinner in a plush hotel in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square for family representatives of those who had died on Flight TE901 was the first part of a logistical effort that involved flying them to McMurdo Sound for a short ceremony on the ice.
These were the daughters, sons and partners of the 257 people who had stepped aboard an aircraft on a spring morning and never returned. At my table was a grandson who had no memory of his grandfather, a wife whose husband had died, and a daughter whose mother had also perished. The conversation was full of the niceties of strangers meeting. We were fed a sumptuous meal and listened attentively as a representative from Air New Zealand gave a long speech, doing his best to be sincere while not apologising for the disaster.
It was an unusual gathering; some of them had moved past the tragedy; others had held on to their grief.
The elderly woman at my table whose husband had died had nurtured her grief until it had taken over her entire demeanour. Instead of sadness, she was swamped by anger. Like a bomb going off, the Erebus disaster had sent shock waves into the generations beyond its victims.
I was the only person at the table who had been to Antarctica, so I was inundated with questions about our impending journey. The elderly widow seemed receptive to the questions the others put forward. She nodded at my description of the effects of 24-hour daylight and seemed interested in the odd behaviour of sea ice.
When someone asked me if I had ever been up Mt Erebus, I nodded and began to describe my helicopter journey with Rob. My story ran flat when I noticed the widow staring at me with a look that came from the dark region between Earth and Hades.
The shadow of the mountain had reached a long way north.
Matt Vance’s latest book Innerland is out now.
