BIG CHILL
One night in London, Frank Worsley dreamed he was steering a ship through icebergs as they floated along Burlington Street in Piccadilly. Propelled by the power of premonition, he rushed out to the street next morning, noticed a nameplate for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, went in and was interviewed on the spot. The veteran New Zealand seaman walked out with a new job, as captain of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, and a new destiny as the right-hand man in one of the greatest survival tales of all time.
For Worsley and me and probably millions more dreamers, Antarctica exists most powerfully in the imagination. It belongs to no one and everyone, but primarily to seals and penguins. Though it’s bigger than Europe, Antarctica wasn’t crossed until 1958 or fully mapped until 1983, and the vast continent is obscured by legend and supernatural weather and ice, in places, nearly five kilometres deep. There’s scant human history here, and scientists working at some 100 research stations and field camps may never fully understand its mysteries.
Like Worsley, I dreamed I was surrounded by icebergs. I woke – or did I? – and I was standing on the balcony of a beautiful ship, shivering in my pyjamas and bare feet, floating south into a dreamscape of icebergs as pale as the horizon they touched. Overhead the sky was a porcelain bowl filled with unreadable cloud formations and unearthly silence.
Latitude 54°48’ S
My dreams of Antarctica began long ago, but the one where I’m on a summer voyage full of icebergs starts in the Argentinian port of Ushuaia, on the windy tip of South America. The locals call it “el fin del mundo” but that’s a misnomer unless you imagine the end of the world has tidy streets with windowboxes in bloom and shops selling penguin souvenirs. I think of Ushuaia instead as the civilised frontier of wild places: Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and, 1000 kilometres south, Antarctica.
