Walking Antarctica: The Ultimate Battle
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Antarctica, five and a half million square miles of land, almost completely covered in
00:29ice. It is the coldest, driest and windiest place on earth. Its desolate beauty has been
00:50seen by just a handful of people. The first explorers set foot here little more than a
00:56hundred years ago. Antarctica is like the surface of the moon. Large tracts of the moon
01:02are better known than Antarctica. Polar explorers were, you know, the astronauts of their day,
01:09literally stepping off the edge of the map into the unknown. Making sense of the unknown is at
01:16the heart of the story of Antarctica. Ever since Captain Cook watched it loom out of the mist,
01:21we have been driven to describe it, define it, name it and mythologize it. Antarctica really is
01:30a blank page from that point of view. There's a need to inscribe meaning on a land that doesn't
01:36naturally have one. The search for meaning amongst the snow and ice can be read in the
01:44logbooks and diaries of explorers and scientists, but it has also captured the imagination of poets,
01:51artists, writers and composers. You've got something which is very wild and pervious to
02:00human meanings. In terms of the imagination though, it's a much more promising prospect
02:05altogether. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around. It cracked and growled
02:12and roared and howled like noises in a swell. Antarctica is big and blank and white and the
02:18urge to scribble on it is just immense. This is a film about the real and imaginary tales of
02:25adventure, romance and tragedy that have played out against a stark white backdrop and why the
02:32most inhospitable place on the planet continues to exert an enduring hold on our imagination.
02:38There is one sentiment about Antarctica that has united everyone from the earliest
02:53explorers to modern adventurers. You get to feel something which ought to have a word other than
03:11cold but doesn't. The coldest I experienced was minus 115 with windchill and when I threw a mug
03:18of boiling water in the air it froze before it hit the ground. Yes, the cold is really born by
03:25the wind. I mean the wind is, it's hard to describe, you know, a constant 50 mile an hour headwind
03:30which of course plummets the temperatures. So that is the sort of the ground base from which
03:36all other sort of difficulties sort of arise really. The noise, you certainly can't hear even
03:42your heartbeat and your balaclava. All you hear is the huge black roar of the wind. It's just like
03:53you're in a vortex. Your brain starts being befuddled by the power of the wind and the noise
04:00of it and I've never met it anywhere else in the world. It's just awesome. A plunge into the writhing
04:09storm whirl stamps upon the senses an indelible and awful impression seldom equaled in the whole
04:15gamut of natural experience. The world a void, grisly, fierce and appalling. The merciless blast,
04:23an incubus of vengeance, stabs, buffets and freezes. The stinging drift, blinds and chokes.
04:30We have found an accursed country.
04:43The cold hard truth about Antarctica only really became apparent in the 20th century.
04:49The first civilizations to imagine it had something far more enticing in mind. Greeks
04:57kind of sensed that Antarctica was there and it was they who named it. They knew about the North,
05:01which they called Arctos, the bear, after the constellation the star. So they called it the
05:05Anti-Arctos because they thought there must be something balancing out what was there at the
05:10top. People used to think that there was a land of great riches down there, you know, land flowing
05:16with milk and honey and tall blonde-haired people. The earliest maps of Antarctica drew more in the
05:22imagination of the cartographer than geographical fact. These are maps of the southern continent
05:29published in 1597 and 1598 and they show this idea of a gigantic landmass around the South Pole. It's
05:40actually indicating mountains and rivers and all sorts of things that, in fact, we know they had
05:48no idea could possibly have existed.
05:59The promise of wealth and undiscovered lands prompted 18th century explorers to venture ever
06:05closer to the fabled continent and in 1773 Captain James Cook sailed into history. At about a quarter
06:16past 11 o'clock we crossed the Antarctic Circle, undoubtedly the first and only ship that ever
06:22crossed that line. Soon after saw an appearance of land to the east and southeast. Hauled up for it,
06:30presently after, it disappeared in the haze. Captain Cook would actually have effectively
06:37followed the currents in the Antarctic vortex. They would have swept him right around the continent,
06:44all the way up this coast and then, in fact, just as he would potentially have been hitting the
06:50peninsula, it actually sweeps him off northward again. So it's actually very difficult for him
06:56really to have got any idea of where the continent lay within this mass of ice and he actually says,
07:06you know, he can't be certain that there is a continent there. He thinks it's very likely that
07:12there is but he's never actually going to hit land. Cook might not have made landfall but his
07:23voyage helped solidify the idea of a vast ice-bound continent. I think for Cook himself it was about
07:32filling in blanks on the map. He sailed around it and saw there was a lot of ice and a lot of
07:36cliffs and glaciers, though there was no 18th century word for a glacier, not for Cook, so he
07:41just said rivers of ice. Lands doomed by nature to perpetual frigidness, never to feel the warmth
07:50of the sun's rays, whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe. What then
07:56may we expect those to be which lie still further to the south? He wrote a very despondent journal
08:05entry about it. He says that he thought nobody would ever envy him the honour of the discovery.
08:20Although Cook had dismissed Antarctica as a worthless endeavour, his account of the
08:26voyage inspired a young poet to immortalise the place in verse. And now there came both
08:33mist and snow, and it grew wondrous cold, and ice, mast high, came floating by as green as emerald,
08:41and through the drifts the snowy cliffs did send a dismal sheen, nor shapes of men nor beasts we
08:48ken, ice was all between. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the first great Antarctic
08:55cultural artefacts and like many of those it was written by somebody who never laid eyes on the
09:00place. Coleridge called himself a library cormorant. He flew his way from book to book.
09:06One of the books he flew to were Cook's accounts of his voyages. But a wonderful transmogrification
09:16takes place between the sensible 18th century sea captain and the visionary romantic poet.
09:22The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around, it cracked and growled and roared and
09:32howled like noises in a swell. It's about phantasmagoric landscapes, strange effects, you
09:41know, the ice, it's emerald green, there were these sea snakes, there were the figures of death. If you
09:47think about the experience of being in Antarctica and seeing mirages, fantasies, all kinds of
09:54extraordinary polar effects, and I think it's that feeling of somebody psychologically
10:00confronting the utterly strange, the alien, something that could not be less hospitable,
10:06that's never had a human presence, I think you find that in Coleridge's poem. At length did
10:12cross an albatross. Through the fog it came, as if it had been a Christian soul, we hailed it in
10:20God's name. It's focused on the figure of the albatross itself, which in the poem is this
10:28spectral motif of doom. Because they kill the albatross, they get carried into polar waters
10:35where the ice, mast high, went floating by as green as emerald, a kind of dream Antarctica of
10:42death and desolation, all as a punishment. But the original of that moment is a very practical journal
10:51entry by Cook, where he announces that they've shot an albatross, they've eaten the albatross, it was
10:56really quite tasty. Cook's voyage whetted the appetite of the men involved in one of the most
11:06lucrative businesses of the age, the trade in seals and whales. Their desire for profits would
11:17bring them closer than anyone had yet been to Antarctica itself. Captain Cook returned home
11:24after his grand oceanographic voyage. He tells a story of a southern ocean rich in seal life and
11:32marine mammal life that captures the imagination of merchant adventurers and maritime men in search
11:39of these bountiful oceans. They move in bulk, both sort of European and American sealers and
11:48whalers in the 1820s, 30s, 40s. And there is an extractive industry based down there, a really
11:57big one, 19th century equivalent of Texaco. London is being partly street lit by whale oil.
12:18The long-abandoned whaling stations that dot the islands around Antarctica show just how
12:31close humans were getting to the continent itself. By the end of the 19th century, drawing rooms and
12:42gentlemen's clubs from New York to London were alive with the idea of making one last great leap
12:48into the unknown. It promises to be the fiercest of all human engagements. Science demands it,
12:56modern progress calls for it, for in this age a blank upon our chart is a blur upon our prided
13:03enlightenment. I think the driving force was Sir Clements Markham, who was then the president of
13:11the Royal Geographical Society. And at the 1896 International Geographical Congress in London,
13:16he made an enormous and very effective plea to everybody that the Antarctic was the last great
13:23frontier and that all nations should actually have it on their agenda for exploration and discovery.
13:28At the turn of the 20th century, a handful of intrepid explorers began to make the arduous
13:37journey to Antarctica. Belgian, British, German, Swedish, French and even Japanese expeditions braved
13:45perilous seas, frostbite and starvation to plant their flags in the ice. This would become the
13:53heroic age of Antarctic exploration. On the face of it, it's a mystery why the heroic age
14:02happens when it happens, why there is this kind of urgency about opening up Antarctica all of a
14:09sudden. It's not as if it is a very desirable place. On the other hand, most of the desirable
14:16parts of the planet have been have been claimed by them. The scramble for Africa is over. They
14:21are running out of blank bits of the map. So one way to look at it is to see this as kind of
14:27imperialism reaching its its absurd limit. It's the equivalent of an Edwardian space race. It was
14:37a race with a clearly defined finishing line, the South Pole. The only problem was finding it. This
14:44actually shows an understanding that there is much still to be learned. This is truly terra incognita.
14:52There is this huge space on the map there. They know that there is something there. They don't
14:57know whether it's islands or whether it's a continent. But they've simply left the space
15:02on the map blank. And it's that infuriating blank on the map, which I think actually drives much of
15:09the later exploration of the continent. Those blank spaces began to be filled in as the world's
15:23explorers plunged deeper into Antarctica. There's a really important difference between Arctic and
15:30Antarctic geography in that Antarctica has never had human inhabitants. There are no local native
15:40place names. There is no local knowledge of the place. So all Antarctic place names are the place
15:46names of discovery. Each of them memorializes some incident in the relatively recent past.
15:54Because you have to remember that although Antarctica as a geological proposition is
15:59hundreds of millions of years old, as a piece of human history Antarctica is little more than 150
16:06years old. So there are an awful lot of things named after pre-First World War monarchs. There
16:12are lots of things named after ship's captains. Each expedition inched closer towards the Holy
16:21Grail and in 1909 an Irish-born explorer called Ernest Shackleton drove a Union Jack into the
16:27ice at the farthest point south yet reached by man. An achievement that secured his lasting fame.
16:35Exploration is a creative activity as much as it's an activity of losing your toes and struggling
16:42across the ice. The success of an expedition, the way in which it's remembered, depends upon
16:48an explorer's ability to tell people about his achievements. One of the key things for Shackleton
16:55then is lecturing. He sings for his supper so he attends dinners. He commits his voice to record.
17:01All of a sudden we heard a shout of help from the man behind. We looked round and saw him supporting
17:11himself by his elbows on the edge of a chasm but nothing but a black drought lay below.
17:17He packs out lecture halls up and down the country in an effort to enhance his profile
17:24as the first or at least the very latest polar celebrity. While Shackleton regaled audiences
17:33with tales of his trek to within a hundred miles of the South Pole, his mentor Captain Robert Falcon
17:38Scott was preparing to go one better. In December 1910 Scott set sail for Antarctica on an ambitious
17:46mission to research the continent and conquer the pole. Scott was very much a product of his time
17:54and was very much caught up in this tremendous desire to get to the South Pole which was the
17:59biggest geographical prize of the day. He was a Navy man through and through. He joined the Navy
18:05at 13. He was very ambitious. His vocation as an explorer began because it was a way to distinguish
18:14himself in what felt like the permanent peacetime world of the Navy. You know if there are no wars
18:20then you need to discover something to get yourself known at the Admiralty. Conscious of
18:28the publicity value that a visual record of the expedition might provide, Scott invited the
18:34foremost photographer of the day to accompany him, Herbert Ponting. As it was my privilege to have
18:40charged the photographic side of the enterprise, I have endeavoured to arrange this film in such a
18:45manner that when you have seen it I hope you will personally feel that you have taken part in a great adventure.
18:58Cinema had just been invented and there it was to be capitalised on, moving pictures of the
19:03Antarctic. What could be better? What could give people a stronger virtual experience of Antarctica?
19:11I was anxious to secure a moving picture film showing the Terra Nova splitting and rending the
19:16broken ice. Some planks were rigged from the focsal to the end of which I fixed my cinematograph.
19:21I hung on as best I could. Ponting still stands out head and shoulders above the rest in terms of
19:28the lengths that he went to go to to secure his shot but also the quality of his photography.
19:34Out of all the animals within the Arctic Circle, penguins stand first and foremost. No creature has
19:41so endeared itself to me and this feeling deepened to real affection as I got to know more of them.
19:53He shot thousands of photographs under tough conditions and he returned with a haul of
20:01of photographs that really defined the way we think of Antarctica but also the way we imagine
20:07and remember this heroic age of explorers. To ensure that his photos had the desired impact,
20:12Ponting would doctor his images, even painting in tiny figures to create a sense of scale.
20:20There's two pictures blended into one here. What he wants to do in this image here is give an idea
20:25of how insignificant human beings are in this massive landscape and at the time, don't forget,
20:33nobody would have seen, very few people would have seen images of anything from Antarctica.
20:38Some of the things he would have set up the shot of the guy in the sledge and he would have taken
20:44the background as a landscape and blend, possibly blend them together in the darkroom. That's one
20:48way of doing it. He could have painted the figure on on the glass plate, that's another way of doing
20:53it. Either way, it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things what he's done.
20:58He's created an image here that everyone can relate to. Oh my god, that's massive. That poor
21:04guy there, if that all falls down, he's going to be dead. So it's, in effect, it's an action shot.
21:09Ponting's iconic images established a visual style that continues to this day.
21:22So
21:34even today, everybody wants the shot looking like a Victorian explorer, the frozen beard and the
21:42frosted eyelashes and eyebrows. Ponting's taken himself here as the explorers want to be seen and
21:49perceived and that's the image that they're all projecting. And of course, any modern day
21:53adventurer, they want to look like a Victorian explorer. They want to look like they've had
21:58a hell of a time. One thing you can't photograph is the cold because it's invisible. But what you
22:03can photograph is the effect of cold on people. And the effect the cold has on people's body
22:10language and their faces and their behaviour, it generates automatically lots of interesting
22:16scenarios for a photographer. What was intended to be a visual record of a triumphant expedition
22:28would be transformed into something more sombre by the fate awaiting Scott and his men
22:33as they set out on their doomed journey to the South Pole.
22:47Scott had not expected to have to race for the South Pole. His predecessor and rival,
22:53Shackleton, had narrowly failed to get there a couple of years earlier. So Scott had thought
22:59of the way as being clear. He was using exactly the same polar technologies as Shackleton, which
23:04was essentially human brawn. And he was extremely surprised and put out of countenance when a party
23:15of swift, lean, mean, very well-equipped Norwegians turned up in Antarctica as well and announced
23:23their plans to make a move as well. On the 17th of January 1912, Scott and his men reached the
23:30South Pole, only to discover that their Norwegian rivals, led by Roald Amundsen, had got there more
23:37than a month before them. The worst has happened. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first
23:45at the Pole. It is a terrible disappointment and I'm very sorry for my companions.
23:53The Pole, great God, this is an awful place. We put up our slighted Union Jack and photographed
24:00ourselves. Mighty cold work. The arduous 800-mile trek back to base would prove a journey too far.
24:08One by one, Scott's party succumbed to injury, fatigue, hunger and a relentless cold.
24:16Scott's diary is crucial here. It provides, it's still an extraordinary experience reading it now,
24:23it provides an immersive, real-time experience of the slow death of a party of human beings
24:33struggling with an environment. Titus Oates is very near the end one feels.
24:39His last words were, I'm just going outside and maybe sometime.
24:46We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit and assuredly the end will not be far.
24:51It seems a pity but I don't think I can write more. Last entry, for God's sake, look after our people.
25:04Scott's death ushered in the last days of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration
25:14but his story would live on in the imagination. Very soon after that, the First World War broke
25:22out and any story which could help the hundreds of thousands of soldiers dying in the trenches
25:30that could show, you know, dying bravely for a cause was something which was encouraged and
25:36helped people to face up to what they were going to have to do the next night.
25:40Some of Ponting's film footage is shown, you know, on the Western Front to rally the troops.
25:44It has a clear message of sacrifice and duty and it wasn't so much Scott's failure
25:51that was glorified, of course, it was the manner in which he met death.
26:01Scott's endeavour had a lasting resonance but the human and material cost of the First World War
26:08diminished the desire for epic expeditions to ice-bound wastelands.
26:13Antarctica goes quiet after the First World War. The impetus of the heroic age is expended. People
26:19are no longer buying the grand pre-war narratives of heroic discovery and, to a great extent, the
26:29big geographical trophy-seeking work is done, so it's not clear why people are going to go back.
26:37With the practical business of epic exploration on hold, Antarctica became a tantalising prospect
26:43for science fiction writers such as H.P. Lovecraft,
26:47intrigued by the idea of what might lurk deep under the ice.
27:0710.15pm, important discovery. Orendorff and Watkins, working underground with light,
27:13found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature. Tissue evidently preserved by
27:20mineral salts, tough as leather. Astonishing flexibility retained in places. Arrangement
27:27reminds one of certain monsters' primal myth. Lost pillared temples, crashed flying saucers,
27:37terrible alien lifeforms which, as in The Thing, will eat you if you're foolish enough to warm
27:44them up again. Antarctica between the wars is the place where the absence of real expeditions
27:50allows for a sort of pulp Antarctica to come along. Antarctica is an annex of the unconscious.
27:58It's a place you can park all the stuff which the rest of the world is too crowded for.
28:04Realism kind of jostles us with its elbows on the settled parts of the planet but Antarctica
28:09is big and blank and white and the urge to scribble on it is just immense.
28:16The sheer scale of that blank canvas had been revealed to the world when American explorer
28:21Admiral Richard Byrd made the first flight to the South Pole in 1929.
28:27Ahead and below us a great glacier descends a pass in a series of ice falls and terraces.
28:33More beautiful than any precipitous stream I have ever seen.
28:37Ahead stretches a great plateau in white immensity to the south,
28:40in which our predecessors parted on foot a few miles a day with hunger stalking them every step
28:45of the way. And now over the spot where Amundsen first stood in 1911, where Scott followed 34 days
28:53later, we fly to and fro. There's nothing now to mark that scene, only white desolation and solitude.
29:05A craving for the solitude that he had observed from the cockpit of his plane
29:09would lead Byrd to undertake an extraordinary solo expedition a decade later.
29:15Admiral Byrd is one of the most significant American
29:19explorers of the Antarctic and he wrote the most fantastic book. It's a book called Alone
29:25and it's about some months he spent through his own choice
29:31on his own at a weather station buried in the Antarctic ice.
29:37Harmony, that was it. That was what came out of the silence. A gentle rhythm,
29:44the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres.
29:48This is the way the world will look to the last man when he dies.
29:54He's playing with what happens if you peel away layers of socialization, I think. At the beginning
30:00he's careful about using cutlery and plates and setting a table and he's sitting there nicely
30:06and reads while he's eating to slow himself down because otherwise he feels like an animal.
30:10So there's a fear of becoming an animal if you remove yourself from society,
30:15a testing of what you have to keep doing to remain human for which, of course,
30:20Antarctica is the perfect setting because you can strip everything right back.
30:25This morning I had to admit to myself that I was lonely.
30:29Try as I may, I find I can't take my loneliness casually.
30:33It is too big but I must not dwell on it otherwise I am undone.
30:39I like Bird because he writes about how he feels and he writes about breaking down and
30:45about being afraid of breaking down and at one point writes about lying on the floor sobbing.
30:50I mean, you know, catch Scott doing that. I'm sure he did lie on the floor and sob but
30:54we'll never know about it. Although he overwinters alone, to give himself a kind of consciously
31:01Scott-like experience, he's getting the baseball scores and the ever-tumbling
31:07depression era Wall Street stock prices coming over the radio every night. He's connected to
31:13the world in a way that the heroic age explorers never were and that connection
31:23is where the future is going to come from.
31:32Advances in technology and communications meant that it would soon be possible
31:36to maintain a permanent human presence on Antarctica.
31:41The huts have to be built on large wooden rafts in place of ordinary foundations
31:45as they're built on the snow. The whole of the huts themselves are prefabricated.
31:50All the timbers are pre-cut and carefully labelled so that anyone, whatever his job,
31:54can take part in this building. But who owned it? Every nation that had taken the trouble to
32:00plant its flag in the ice felt it had a justifiable claim and there were symbolic ways to emphasise it.
32:07When there were territorial claims from the 1940s onwards, various countries were issuing stamps.
32:13Once one started, and that was the Falkland Islands Dependencies in 1943, they nearly
32:19all started. Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Argentina and Chile all produced various issues
32:26and nearly all the early stamps have maps on them purely to show the territories they
32:32were claiming actually existed because in truth hardly anybody else knew where they were.
32:37Here we have Pochte SSSR 40 Corpex, a stamp showing the voyages of the ships to establish
32:45their station. This one you have the entire map of the Antarctic and you can see the three flags
32:51with the three stations Pochte SSSR. Here you have General San MartÃn station being established,
32:59the sea ice, a rock from the peninsula in the background and a sledge even with a sledge wheel
33:05on it. Nicely done. The first hint that Antarctica might be a continent to be fought over
33:20came as early as 1939 when the Nazis sprinkled the snow with metal swastikas in a bid to stake
33:26their claim. By the 1950s the world was convulsed by a conflict with grim Antarctic connotations.
33:35Cold War. There's a period in the 1950s when it looks as if Antarctica is going to be the setting
33:42for some really serious superpower competition. A kind of again an earthly analogue to the space
33:51race. The United States has taken over Antarctic logistics. They built their enormous base at
33:57McMurdo and they are flying Hercules transport planes all over the continent and the Soviet
34:03Union is setting up a rival Antarctic infrastructure which runs on converted artillery
34:11caterpillar tractors. With Antarctica poised ominously on the brink, salvation arrived
34:28from an unlikely source. In 1957 an initiative called the International Geophysical Year
34:34united the world's scientists in a quest for discovery. As the summer sun rose over the
34:39Antarctic this year, 12 nations are setting up a total of 22 observatories. Each year the snow
34:46produces its own layer like the rings in the trunk of a tree. By studying these layers we can trace
34:52back important happenings in the climate of the earth. If the superpowers could collaborate on
34:58research into Antarctic weather and geography, might they find a way to share control of the
35:03continent as well? Antarctica is unique as the only venue for the Cold War which the sides step
35:13back from. They agree to put it beyond competitive use and they sign this extraordinary document,
35:22the Antarctic Treaty which comes into force in 1961 which reserves it for science. It's the
35:29only bit of the planet which is reserved for science. This is the Antarctic Treaty in operation.
35:38This is the only large truly international territory on earth.
35:42I'm sorry I don't understand. It insisted that all activities in the Antarctic were open to inspection.
35:52This was absolutely crucial to the Americans because they were convinced that the Russians
35:56would cheat otherwise. Anybody who's interested now in seeing the scientific activities will make
36:02a little tour around. And it's the only part of the world where any nation that's a member of the
36:10treaty can actually turn up at any other nation's station and demand to be shown anything on the
36:15station and ask anybody there any questions. So it's completely open regime. Where else in the
36:22world could a group of Americans land at a Russian base and be greeted first and last as fellow
36:27scientists and human beings? Where else do these two flags fly from the same pole? And indeed you
36:33could say it was the the first non-nuclear treaty because it banned all nuclear activities from the
36:39Antarctic. As scientists and military men moved in in numbers, for the first time in its history
36:46Antarctica could be said to have had a human population. After the romance and tragedy of
36:52the heroic age, what new kind of culture would emerge?
37:09When I went to the Antarctic in the 1960s, it was a place for men to go because only men went in those days.
37:20It was a place especially for hairy men. It was a very adventurous place to go.
37:32The American bases in the Antarctic were built by navy guys in the 50s. It certainly was a hardship
37:38post then and little regard for health and safety and certainly no regard for the environment. I'm
37:44afraid they did unspeakable things to penguins. I used to think of it as like the gold rush towns.
37:52A flourishing game of dice for the regular inhabitants.
37:55What made you come? I don't know. Money.
38:00Oh I guess I came down for the experience and advancement and now I'm beginning to think that I
38:06cracked in the head a little bit. So you know I won't be back.
38:11And it was a very macho culture and to a certain extent that's persisted on the bases.
38:16It was one wonderful camp I went to in the dry valleys in the trans-Antarctic mountains
38:20where they had a blow-up sheep which they called a love you, get it ewe, which represented some of
38:27the deprivations that they experienced. Each of the stations in the Antarctic is a wonderful
38:34microcosm of the culture of the country that established it and runs it. And what could be more
38:39like home than a typically British pub serving I'm delighted to say typically British people.
38:49Home comforts might provide a distraction but being confined at close quarters in a
38:53hostile environment poses unexpected challenges. One of the interesting things about the Antarctic
39:01is that it's quite hard to be alone. You're almost always with other people so if you want to go
39:09to the most underpopulated part of the world and think you're going to be alone all the time
39:12you're not. Breathing space at least indoors is at a premium. The men live four to a room
39:18sleeping in bunks in crowded conditions. The biggest problem in any Antarctic base
39:23is getting on with your colleagues when the base is snowbound.
39:26Yeah, I was up at the pole when they locked up the first guy they ever locked up in the Antarctic.
39:31We built a brig, shoved his ass in it. Seemed like a real nice fella during the summer.
39:36Well, the day the last plane left you did a one-ante,
39:39got hold of some booze, some medicine, you just went in snaky.
39:50To a certain extent the most compelling challenges of the Antarctic I think are
39:55emotional or mental.
40:00And there's many stories about people going sort of plain old-fashioned bonkers.
40:04For example, on a Soviet station one fellow killed another fellow with an ice axe during
40:12a game of chess, over the game of chess, and to stop it happening again the Soviets banned chess.
40:19Some people are more suited to the Antarctic experience than others.
40:25We don't take doer people who are inclined not to forgive and forget, so we don't take Yorkshire
40:33people. We very rarely take people with spectacles because they can't see once it gets misted up and
40:42they're manholing. A large amount of humanity when they're under stress or physically under
40:47stress or physically pained get almost malicious, get nasty and sort of sarcastic and so on.
40:56So what you're looking for is people who are good-natured, who don't get too excited when
41:03things are going very well or too dismal when they're going badly. So you need placid,
41:08docile people who aren't malevolent in any way. It's living with other people
41:16who you can't get away from, whose idiosyncrasies you have to put up with, and they have to put up
41:22with yours. It's an exercise in tolerance that very few people actually have to undergo, but if
41:28you can survive it then you've learned a great many lessons which are useful in the rest of your life.
41:39The presence of established bases created an infrastructure that allowed Antarctica to be
41:44experienced by a whole new circle of people, lured by the majesty of the ice and the charm
41:49of the wildlife. Not a likely spot Antarctica for a package holiday and yet for the first time 40
41:57British tourists led by Peter Scott recently embarked on a white safari. Nearly 50 years
42:04after Captain Scott's death his son Peter was escorting a party of tourists on the holiday
42:10of a lifetime. Red windproof uniforms provided by the travel agent, ships life belts, special
42:17underwear, layers of woolies, fancy headgear, mittens, half-grown beards, climbing boots,
42:24sunglasses, binoculars, cameras, even a walkie-talkie. It's a trip of a lifetime, it is expensive.
42:31I made somewhat of a snap decision. When I get to the Antarctic I'm hoping to see really big things,
42:37towering icebergs and the pack ice. The Antarctic wildlife is what appeals to me quite enormously
42:44in all its ramifications. Mrs June Smith of Hereford is helped ashore by a Chilean scientist
42:51to become the first ever British tourist to set foot on the mainland of Antarctica.
42:57It's difficult not to feel some sense of regret that the last great frontier has fallen to the
43:02tourist but it's a selfish thought. It's right that at least some parts of the Antarctic should
43:09be open to those who choose to come. Those curious tourists who realized their Antarctic dreams in
43:191968 were testimony to the continuing mystique of the frozen continent and it began to entice
43:26a new breed of private adventurers eager to achieve ever greater feats of endurance.
43:33There's something deep within the human spirit that finds places like these appealing, intractable,
43:40impossible to escape from. Something within the human spirit that reaches out to a challenge
43:45like the South Pole that still appeals to many men who are willing to risk their lives and their
43:51reputations to walk there, to fly there, to ski there, to race there. It's a crucible of ambition,
43:57it's a holy grail, it's a stage, it's a blank canvas.
44:03In the 1970s a young Ranulph Fiennes sought to write his name into the record books by staging
44:11the first expedition to circumnavigate the world on its polar axis. My late wife and I had been
44:19trying to make a living out of expeditions so she basically sent me to a library and I discovered
44:25there was a big white bit at the bottom called Antarctica and I found that to go from one side
44:30to the other hadn't been done by the world's experts. A brief notice in an obscure journal
44:37announced the expedition's goals and a call for volunteers. No polar experience necessary,
44:44it declared. Hard work, great danger and no pay. No guarantee of success or glory.
44:53Presented in such stark realistic terms, could the crossing of the forbidding South and North
44:59Poles attract even the most restless of romantics? Was the British tradition for
45:05this kind of bold adventure still alive?
45:11After seven years of fundraising, preparation and rigorous training, the trans-globe expedition
45:18finally got underway in 1979. We eventually got down to Antarctica, we got dropped off by the
45:24ship that said goodbye for 18 months. They'll see us on the other side, the Pacific, and we
45:30spent eight months waiting for the dark cold period to end. We lived under the snow, four of us.
45:39Morale is given an extra boost by a call from Prince Charles. At this time the public is far
45:45more aware of the eligible bachelor's social life and his interest in trans-globe.
45:52Thank you very much indeed sir, we also send you our best wishes and hope you keep well and don't
45:58hurt yourself at all at polo or any other rough games. So best wishes from everyone here sir.
46:04It's splendid what you're doing, I still think it's mad but it's marvellous.
46:09The ultimate success of the trans-globe expedition would depend upon the team's
46:16ability to pass the target that had thwarted Shackleton and killed Scott, the South Pole.
46:26When the day came I thought, am I going to do it or am I going to get lost somewhere out there
46:32in this enormous nothingness. The means of transport had improved but the perils remained the same.
46:42In Antarctica as navigator what we were looking for was a total whiteness, not a view of any sort.
46:51Any sort of view could spell trouble because it would mean there was rocks or mountaintops or
46:57something. Because Antarctica, if you take it like a sort of cake with liquid icing on top of
47:04it because that's what it's like, all that icing from the top middle of the cape is eventually
47:10going to seep out to to the outside. So because of this movement it's causing cracks which are
47:15called crevasses. The hidden dangers they encountered were recreated for the camera.
47:23I walked only a meter from the sledge and I just plummeted down through an unseen crevasse.
47:39But the panic and the adrenaline must have made me so frightened that I pulled myself out using
47:49legs and arms like a sort of, you know, a cat that's scratching to try and get out of your hand.
47:57Cool. Teach one where not to put one's weight. Yeah sorry about that. So we want no view whatsoever,
48:05we don't want beauty or prettiness, we just want to get to A to B because we're about
48:10sort of trying to break world records which you don't do if you don't go fast.
48:19At the geographical bottom of the world,
48:26Graham, Ollie and Charlie could justifiably revel in their achievement.
48:37We ended up being the only human beings before or since who have ever been around the surface
48:43of earth through the poles. Today more people have been walking on the moon than have ever
48:48been around earth's surface. Antarctica remains the ultimate challenge for those keen to test
48:56themselves against the most extreme conditions. Adventurer Henry Worsley invoked the spirit of
49:02Shackleton in his 2009 trek to the pole, but he discovered the continent is not quite the blank
49:08canvas it once was. Yes I found intrusions into the sort of intensity of the sort of isolation of
49:18the place quite difficult to get over. We occasionally came across sort of meteorological
49:23masts stuck in the middle of absolute nowhere with an anemometer on the top, a couple of
49:28solar panels and a sort of thermometer and I remember one occasion a little sign at the bottom
49:33saying this is the property of the University of Wisconsin. Now that really annoyed me but I
49:38wasn't prepared really for the for what we saw at the pole in terms of the size and quite
49:42extraordinarily saw a car just as we were pulling up sort of in starting to come through the sort of
49:48administrative area you know a car pulled out for a site that can't be more than sort of a
49:53kilometer square at its largest. So what's supposed to be the sort of most remote part
49:59of the globe was a bit of a shock.
50:07For Scott and Shackleton it was an imaginary symbol. For today's adventurers it's a stripy pole
50:13and even the chance of a flight home should you want it. I don't want to knock the achievements
50:18of those who explore Antarctica now in the sense of challenging themselves to cross it in
50:26various ways. That's very significant for them and we clearly still have an appetite for
50:34reading about it but it no longer has the connection to science and it no longer has
50:40that sense of being something that's charged with the urgent imaginative business of the
50:47culture that sent them. It's extreme sports and why not? Why shouldn't there be icy versions of
50:54extreme sports? But I don't feel that it's carrying the weight of the Antarctic story
50:59in the way that it used to.
51:11In an attempt to reconnect with that imaginative world in the 1990s Antarctica's governing bodies
51:17began to invite a host of writers, artists, poets and composers to immerse themselves in the
51:23continent and evoke its sights and sounds in their work.
51:38The first attempt was a joint commission with the Philharmonia Orchestra for Peter
51:44Maxwell Davis to visit the Antarctic and write a new piece of music.
51:48And it filled the Royal Festival Hall at its premiere and we realised that there were a lot
51:53of people out there who were interested in the Antarctic but from an emotional and cultural
51:58point of view rather than a scientific point of view.
52:03Author Sarah Wheeler was one of those people and in 1996 she set out to convey a personal
52:09passion for the continent in the first travel book about Antarctica.
52:13I spent seven months in the Antarctic. I lived in my tent most of the time in field camps with
52:18the American government's painter in residence. It was much harder for her than it was for me
52:23because all her paints froze and then there'd be a whiteout for 10 days and then she had to
52:28paint me. It's pretty tough living under those circumstances even if you're living a cushy life
52:32as a writer as I was. I think the worst thing was sleeping. I was sleeping for a long time
52:39as a writer as I was. I think the worst thing was sleeping because you have to have in the
52:44sleeping bag with you when you're camping in the Antarctic any equipment that might freeze,
52:49cameras, recording equipment, your water bottle for the next day, a pair of socks if you want
52:54to have a pair of socks that aren't frozen. So it's like sleeping in a cutlery drawer.
53:08So
53:23writers and artists might grapple with the blank immensity of Antarctica but it is the scientists
53:29who have been working methodically on the ice since the 1940s who have come to transform the
53:34way we view the continent. Because we've been there a long time and because we've collected
53:39data systematically we are able to show very clearly how global change is affecting the
53:46Antarctic. You could say the Antarctic is like the white canary in the mine.
53:51It's telling us there's something wrong and we need to do something to fix it.
53:55The Antarctic science has become more and more obviously urgent. The ice cores dug out of
54:06Antarctica tell us about past climate and about the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
54:11It was in Antarctica that CFCs proved to be gouging a hole in the ozone layer and
54:17threatening the southern hemisphere with skin cancers. Antarctic knowledge is suddenly urgent
54:24knowledge. Yet the more we learn about Antarctica the more its potential as a source of great oil
54:33and mineral wealth becomes apparent. The mining companies have been kept at bay by the continent's
54:38scientific value but only so far. Perhaps it does make sense to think of it as a knowledge resource
54:46to the planet. It may well be that the science which can be pumped out of Antarctica
54:53is actually more valuable than any amount of petroleum. The secrets that lurk beneath the ice
55:01once charged the imaginations of science fiction writers but the reality might prove even more
55:07astounding. There's some really cutting-edge research implausible even for scientists of
55:14today to get their heads around. It reaches to the heavens that you know the science that's
55:19been done there will perhaps hold the clues to dark matter to the to the the possibility of
55:25extraterrestrial life to life on the moons of the moon of Jupiter you know really cutting-edge
55:32science that leaps from the page leaps from the continent.
55:42What once seemed a desolate place a little more than symbolic value
55:45has been reimagined as something far more precious. Antarctica is now seen as a place that
55:52needs protection rather than conquest a place actually that is cherished rather than feared
55:58a place that is fragile. Some say it's the front line rather like the arctic of global warming
56:06it's here that the the effects of climate change are most keenly felt. Now clearly the way that we
56:13act in Antarctica matters now.
56:26In the two centuries since Captain Cook thought he spied land through the mist
56:30we've begun to make sense of this strange continent. We've mapped it named it and claimed it.
56:43We have lived there and died there and left behind frozen relics memorials to a vanished age.
56:54We have agreed to share it and we have colonized it.
57:00We have been inspired by it and we have begun to decode a fraction of its secrets.
57:06But we have only just begun to scratch the surface of a place that can seem to defy understanding.
57:22I've never been anywhere which is so obviously not made out of words not made out of human
57:30it's not made out of human perceptions and understandings it's it's itself it stands apart
57:38from from human culture it it overshadows human culture and there is something
57:45transporting and rather good for us in getting to a place so indifferent a place which which
57:53we really cannot plausibly claim is is just a subdivision of our own concerns.
58:00I stepped into an avalanche it covered up my soul
58:30so