MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH
The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night
by Julian Sancton Penguin Random House
Madhouse at the End of the Earth tells the story of Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery’s eccentric Belgian Antarctic Expedition, which set sail from Europe in August 1897, intent on becoming the first scientific enterprise to reach the South Pole. Perhaps predictably, it didn’t work out.
The team instead became the first to overwinter in the Antarctic; not all of the crew returned.
The book’s cover shows the three-masted steam whaler RV Belgica locked fast in pack ice, the scene radiating an eerie, twilit chill. ‘They were sailing through an empty map,’ observes author Julian Sancton of the time immediately before the ship became stuck.
On rare occasions, Captain Lecointe was able to glimpse the stars and fix the ship’s position. ‘In reality, however, we are as hopelessly isolated as if we were on the surface of Mars, and we are plunging still deeper and deeper into the white Antarctic silence,’ wrote Dr Cook, the expedition’s true hero. The fact that so many of the crew survive is really down to his brilliance. Explorer, medic, sociologist, inventor, fraudster, photographer (the cover shot is his), he was the man who saved the ship’s company from scurvy and psychosis.
Sancton’s telling of the Belgica’s jam reads like a thriller. His extensive research is tangible in the text and he has the appealing habit of ending each chapter with a cliffhanger. There are plenty of surprises, too.
The Belgica’s first mate was a young Norwegian named Roald Amundsen, who spends much of the voyage jotting down personal milestones and notes about how he’ll do things differently when his turn comes. ‘Unfortunately, the scientists are very frightened,’ runs a diary entry on the eve of de Gomery’s impulsive and unilateral decision to sail south and entomb the ship in pack ice – almost as if the scientists who had been specifically promised that this wouldn’t happen because it was suicide were being unreasonable wimps. ‘Amundsen could surely tell that his high spirits made him an exception on board,’ writes Sancton.
The author’s mix of reportage and novelistic reconstruction keeps the story rolling, even in the frozen doldrums of a months-long polar night. For all the expedition’s early farce, the human tragedy of the venture hits home and the shadows cast on the survivors are revealed to be long and lasting.
Growing up Suwalki, a small city in northeastern Poland, in the 1990s, photographer Paulina Korobkiewicz was constantly bemused by the look of the spaces around her. Stark Soviet-era architecture clashed oddly with American-style adverts and decorations – a palm-tree more at home in LA; bright, tacky billboards. Even these tributes to the West didn’t seem to match up with the popular culture she consumed as a child. And then there was the lack of organised planning in the post-Soviet years that resulted in apartment blocks painted randomly in bright blocks of colour. Ultimately, it wasn’t a landscape of which she could feel proud.
‘These were the places that I was embarrassed by. One of the reasons I moved to London was because I wanted to not be around spaces like that – I wanted to be in places that looked nice, where everything is well designed and public space serves people in a way that it doesn’t back home,’ she says. Combined with a sense of inferiority linked to her background, this made for a complicated relationship with her home and identity. ‘Coming from Eastern Europe, there is always a certain trauma and a certain feeling of inferiority as an immigrant. As a Polish girl living in London – there are a lot of ideas attached to what that means.’ Things began to change when Korobkiewicz chose to focus on the very scenes that had made her feel uncomfortable for a photography project, honing in on incongruous architecture and signs of culture clash. ‘It made me realise that the banal, the mundane can actually become a testimony of our existence. Essentially, these are everyday things that don’t normally matter or are something that I try to bypass, but they became something that I was actively searching for. Photographing those things is a way to own where I come from.’
The final project was entitled ‘Disco Polo’, the name of a locally popular music genre that developed in eastern Poland around the time of the political transition. According to Korobkiewicz, the genre created its own aesthetics, from the outfits to the venues where it was performed. To her, the naive lyrics and over-saturated video clips embody a longing for Western capitalism and the hope for a better future in exactly the same way as the gaudy signs of her hometown.