MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH
THE BELGICA’S JOURNEY INTO THE DARK ANTARCTIC NIGHT
JULIAN SANCTON
WH Allen, 350pp, £20
It’s a fair bet that Adrien de Gerlache, an aristocratic Belgian, would not feature on most people’s lists of polar explorers. So Julian Sancton’s epic tale belatedly does justice to a man who, although not exactly heroic, deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Scott and Shackleton. In August 1897 de Gerlache set sail for the Antarctic in the Belgica, a three-masted steam whaler. But what began as an exuberant odyssey, undertaken by a ragtag team of scientists, sailors and adventurers, later became a terrible ordeal in one of the most hostile environments on earth. Weakened by scurvy, the crew also suffered from boredom, fatigue, depression and hysteria.
In the Guardian Geoff Dyer praised Sancton for his ‘watertight narrative’, which records how, the further south they go, the leader’s log becomes ‘a chronicle of slow but inexorable constriction. The days shorten and soon turn into endless night. And then they are stuck, with no choice but to wait for the sun to return and the ice to free the Belgica from its grip. Or to tighten it, and shatter their fragile refuge.’
‘This section of the book,’ said James Mcconnachie in the Sunday
Times, ‘feels like a stage play of the most unbearably tense and gothic sort. De Gerlache retreated to his cabin, staring for hours at a blank log book … Meanwhile the ship’s American doctor, Frederick Cook, saved the crew’s lives by making them eat seal and penguin meat, either raw or sealed in oleomargarine … When the ice finally loosened, in March 1899, they had to use explosives to clear a “claw” of ice around the stern, then ram their way through using penguin corpses – a final gothic touch – as bow fenders.’