Susan Buckland: Call of the wild to Antarctica

COMMENT


A few years ago I sailed to the sub antarctic islands of New Zealand with expedition leader Rodney Russ. He keeps me on his mailing list, calculating that one day I'll sail the Southern Oceans again. I'll have forgotten the rough bits, like a mother who forgets about the ardour of delivery after her baby is born.

You are right of course, Rodney. The memory is now hazy of the green-faced passengers who disappeared to their cabins and didn't emerge until we had anchored in a calm harbour.

The heaving seas that sent all but the stiletto-heeled Russian waitress lurching from port to starboard in the ship's restaurant seems amusing in retrospect, though at the time I thought her heroic, not to mention acrobatic. So did two of her most ardent admirers, a couple of leathery seniors who had left their wives at home. Riveted, they watched her mince among us in her high heels, as if on a tight rope, never dropping a single dish or slopping an ounce of wine.

Since the arrival of this year's expedition newsletter I have been feeling the call of the south, imagining Rodney with his latest batch of expeditioners. By now they will have explored one or two of the Sub Antarctic Islands en route.

The islands lie far south like daubs of paint on an oily canvas. Pounded by the waves, they are home to rare and entrancing wildlife. And the only neighbours to visit the few scientists permitted to reside there are sealions, elephant seals, penguins and sea birds who have found minimum disturbance in these lonely latitudes.

In the 19th and early-20th centuries, sealers, whalers, colonists and farmers tried to conquer these solitary outposts but they failed. The native plants and animals are gradually recovering and reclaiming the islands. They have become national reserves and visitor numbers are restricted.

With each of his summer expeditions Rodney's conviction grows that scientists alone cannot protect them. If people, carefully managed, have the chance to experience these last frontiers, they will help to safeguard them.

I am haunted by the first experience of stepping ashore on Campbell Island - the feeling of being the minority species, tolerated by the serene albatross on their nests, the curious, doe-eyed Hooker sealions, the nonchalant elephant seals belching into the wind. We were guests and we observed the rule to keep a polite 5m distance.

The ship that sailed us into the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties was a Russian icebreaker called the Shokalskiy. It had made first for Campbell Island where the peace hit first. Then the rugged beauty. Valleys of lilac mega herbs rose from the mist like magic carpets. The white chests of Royal albatross nestled in the tussock were illuminated.

The visit to Campbell Island was poignant for Rex Aldridge, who ran the New Zealand weather station there half a century ago. Computers do the job now. When we found Rex's old station, the rotting frame had succumbed to the weather and the coal range was rusting into the vegetation.

Lashed by westerly wind, many sailing ships came to grief on the cliffs of the Sub Antarctic Islands. The most famous is the 1866 wreck of the General Grant. Sixty-eight people died. Incredibly, several survivors were rescued two years later.

On the homeward run, as the cloud thins and the sun begins to penetrate, some of the passengers on Rodney's expedition will imagine the despair that drove the colonists in 1852 from the mist-shrouded islands to the south.

On the way north the ocean will be alive with feeding birds. Petrels, shearwaters and mollymawks will flirt with the ship and dazzle with their aerobatics. Perhaps for me, the hours on deck watching the seabirds had fended off the nausea, as well as my father's challenge that no daughter of his would succumb because during his years as a World War II naval officer at sea, he hadn't.

Armed with seasickness pills and the advice to never throw up into the wind I didn't let him down. I'll take them on the next voyage south though, just in case.