ADVENTURE IN ANTARCTICA
Risk takers trek across icy expanse
ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION TIMELINE
Up until the 18th century, the continent at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere was drawn in as Terra Australis Incognito.
1773
Captain James Cook and his crew are the first to cross the Antarctic Circle. In 1775, Cook claimed South Georgia Island for Britain. On his third voyage, Cook sailed past South Georgia but did not see the continent of Antarctica.
1820
The question of who discovered Antarctica is controversial. American sealer Nathaniel B. Palmer, Captain Edward Bransfield of Britain, and Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen from Russia, all laid claim to its discovery.
1821
American sealer and explorer John Davis and his crew are the first to land on Antarctica.
1823
Englishman James Weddell sails to 74 degrees south, the furthest south reached to this point in the sea that now bears his name.
1840
Jules-Sebastian Dumont d’Urville discovers a stretch of Antarctic coastline, which he names for his wife, Adelie. The penguins found there also bear her name.
1841
In January, James Clark Ross discovers Victoria Land and enters the sea that now bears his name. He discovered Ross Island and named an active volcano, Mount Erebus, and a smaller inactive volcano, Mount Terror, after his ships. The British Admiralty subsequently sent the ships to the Arctic under John Franklin’s command to search for the Northwest Passage. Franklin and his crew all died in the attempt. Ross commanded a rescue expedition to find Franklin in 1848. The wreck of the Erebus was discovered in 2014, and the HMS Terror in 2016.
1890
Having depleted the whaling stock to the north, whalers move southward triggering a renewed interest in the Antarctic, with explorers from various countries vying to become the first to reach the South Pole. It’s romantically dubbed “The Heroic Age.”
1898
Adrien de Gerlache and the crew of Belgica are trapped in pack ice off the Antarctic Peninsula. They drift for a year, but manage to become the first to survive an Antarctic winter.
1902
Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjold and five crew members spend the first of two winters and make the first major sled journey in Antarctica. Their ship was crushed in the ice pack after leaving the crew on Snow Hill Island, creating two separate groups of explorers. Miraculously, the second crew survived the winter and found their way back to the island where the whole party was rescued in 1903 by an Argentine relief ship.
1902
Brits Robert F. Scott, Edward Wilson and Ernest Shackleton get within 745 kilometres of the South Pole. Scurvy, frostbite and a supply shortage force them to turn back. In their struggle to survive, they killed and ate their sled dogs.
1904
Norwegian Carl Larsen builds the first whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia. Within 10 years, more than 20 stations and factory ships are operating in this region.
1908
Ernest Shackleton, Frank Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams get within 156 km of the South Pole, but are forced to turn back because of a shortage of supplies.
1911
Two teams race to reach the South Pole. Using sled dogs and skis, Norwegian Roald Amundsen and four team members get there first on Dec. 14. Amundsen plants a Norwegian flag and leaves letters for Robert Scott and his four-man team. Scott arrived a month later. He and his team all died on the way back.
1912
After other members of his expedition team die, Australian geologist Douglas Mawson treks across George V Land back to his base at Commonwealth Bay only to see the expedition’s ship sailing away. He survived for a year before being rescued.
1915
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Ernest Shackleton aims to be the first to cross the continent. After their ship, the Endurance, is wrecked, Shackleton and five others sail nearly 1,300 kilometres in a small, open boat to reach a supply depot on South Georgia, while 28 others remain on Elephant Island in the South Shetlands. But the supplies weren’t there, so Shackleton, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley trekked across the island to a whaling station. It took more than a year and four tries before Shackleton finally returned for his crew on Elephant Island.
1922
At the age of 48, Shackleton dies of a heart attack while on another expedition. He is buried at South Georgia.
1929
American aviator Richard Byrd and three others are the first to fly over the South Pole.
1958
An expedition led by New Zealand explorer Edmund Hillary is the first to complete an overland crossing of Antarctica and the first to reach the South Pole since Scott in 1912. Hillary’s team used modified Massey Ferguson tractors.
2016
British explorer Henry Worsley — a distant relative of Shackleton team member Frank Worsley — dies attempting to cross Antarctica unaided, 50 kilometres short of his goal. In 2012, Henry Worsley’s expedition had successfully retraced Roald Amundsen’s 1912 route to the South Pole.
2017
Ben Saunders, another British explorer, fails in his attempt at a solo, unaided and unassisted crossing of Antarctica. Fellow Brit Robert Swan completes his second trek to the South Pole.
With research by Vancouver Sun librarian Carolyn Soltau
In mid-December, four weeks into a solo, unsupported and unassisted crossing of Antarctica, British adventurer Ben Saunders began to realize it might not end as he had planned.
He was trudging in whiteouts that made navigating difficult, caused headaches, slight nausea, and brought on bouts of vertigo. He compared it to being “on a treadmill in a brightly lit freezer with a white pillowcase over my head.”
Unusually for the Antarctic summer, there were sastrugi — big windblown ridges of snow, some as tall as him — that he had to clamber up while dragging the sled carrying all of his supplies.
One day, Saunders skied straight onto “a rock-hard lump of windblasted snow about the same shape and size as a small sheep,” landing hunched over with his skis on the “sheep’s” back and his poles planted in front of him.
“There is something very humbling about Antarctica. It can be quite intimidating because it has no regard for life,” Saunders tells me via Skype from London.
The ferocious weather changed his calculations about the amount of food he had, the distance he had left to go, and the number of days it would take to cover it. Each day, Saunders became ever more conscious of being alone.
“As the daily averages (of distance covered) did not start to increase, I became more and more resigned — no, resigned is not the right word — I came to be completely at peace with my decision,” he says.
Saunders is a highly experienced polar adventurer. In 201314, he and Tarka L’Herpiniere set a world record for the longest polar journey on foot — 2,913 kilometres — from Ross Island on the eastern coast to the South Pole and back again.
After 52 days, the 40-year-old arrived at the South Pole on Dec. 28, 2017. It was decision time. Continue on and risk surviving on half-rations? Resupply and continue, although it would mean he could no longer claim to have done it unsupported? Or, quit and go home.
“I’d received a lot of supportive messages from others who have done similar things. They said, ‘It’s possible. You can do it.’ They were sitting in their armchairs by the fire with their coffee beside them,” Saunders says.
“But I just knew it wasn’t feasible ... You have a far slimmer appetite for risk when you are on your own. There is obviously less margin for error and I didn’t feel I had a sufficient safety margin.”
Two people weighed heavily on Saunders’ mind as he made the decision to end the quest after reaching the South Pole. One was his fiancee, Pip Harrison — they are getting married in June.
The other was his friend, Henry Worsley.
Saunders had intended to finish the trip that defeated and, ultimately, killed Worsley, who called for help after 70 days and only 50 kilometres from the finish.
He had waited too long. Dehydrated and malnourished, Worsley was airlifted to Union Glacier base camp, diagnosed with an infection of the abdominal lining, and flown to Chile. He died there on Jan. 24, 2016. He was 55.
Worsley, too, had set out to complete an unfinished journey — one begun a century earlier by his hero, Ernest Shackleton, who in 1915 set out to be the first to cross the continent. Coincidentally, among Shackleton’s crew was a distant relative — Frank Worsley.
What drives men like these, or someone like Felicity Aston, who in 2012 was the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica hauling two sleds? Or Cecilie Skog and partner Ryan Waters, who became the first to make an unassisted Antarctic crossing ?
Or Robert Swan, the first to have walked to both poles, and on his second walk to the South Pole was there the day before Saunders flew out in December? Swan had just successfully completed a final walk to the South Pole with his son, Barney, on the first expedition to the pole using only clean energy technologies.
Psychologist Peter Suedfeld has spent most of his career studying people in extreme environments — everyone from polar explorers to NASA astronauts.
“They’re unusual people in quite a few ways,” says the emeritus professor at the University of B.C. “But they’re not completely off the scales.”
Most of the qualities are obvious: They are more willing to take risks, are more comfortable alone, are physically tough, and more open to new experiences.
Whether astronauts or adventurers, the biggest difference between us and them is they have a high need for achievement, says Suedfeld.
“They want to do something that is outstanding, something better than what they had done before, something perceived as a victory or success. Other motives (such as exploration, scientific research) are somewhat secondary.”
But what is interesting to Suedfeld is how they react when their quest is thwarted. Some are able to redefine it as a success.
Shackleton rather ruefully acknowledged that struggle for meaning, writing to his wife, “I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.”
What has changed adventuring is communications.
Both Swan and Saunders were in daily contact with the outside world.
What they did each day is documented in both words and images on their blogs ( bensaunders.com/ blog and 2041.com/ blog).
Saunders says his experience deepened his respect and awe for what people like Shackleton, Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen were able to accomplish.
“They were ill-equipped, badly clothed by contemporary standards. They sailed away from home for three years, and at a time when there was no hope for rescue,” Saunders says.
“When Shackleton turned around short of the South Pole on the Nimrod Expedition (190709), he would have already been there for a year and still had 18 months of travel. It was like being on another planet.”
Yet, then as now, there was no shortage of adventurers. There were 17 major Antarctic expeditions from 10 countries between 1897 and 1922, a period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration,
Almost every expedition recorded a first. They climbed and named mountains that were previously unknown and crossed terrain that no one had trod before. It was thrilling, terrifying work, reflected in Shackleton’s ad looking for men to join him on the aptly named Endurance Expedition: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”
The big prize was first to the pole, which Norway’s Amundsen accomplished on his 1910-12 expedition.
But, as Suedfeld points out, the majority of people in Antarctica aren’t lone adventurers.
They are drivers, radio operators, cooks, construction workers, nurses and scientists.
“With all credit to them, because I admire their courage and adaptability, Saunders and others like him are the whipped cream on the Antarctic cake. The cake is made up of the others (workers and scientists).”
For those others, there is not much adventure at all once they get there.
Sure, they might go out occasionally to see an ice cave or a penguin rookery.
But for the most part, Suedfeld says, their biggest challenge is the monotony of doing the same things every day with the same people.