This warning is one of the slogans common
to the guides who welcome you to your expedition ship. It is
their way of preparing you for the Drake Passage, that nightmare
for passengers but also (sometimes) for the crew itself. It
is only by facing the wrath of the Drake that one becomes worthy
of contemplating this white and threatening continent, a continent
that seems deceivingly serene at first view. With the force
10, the force 12 winds that blew up as soon as you left the
Beagle Channel, you stagger like a drunkard through the ship’s
corridors. In the dining room, the table tops have raised edges
to stop the plates from sliding onto your lap. The chairs are
attached to the floor by straps. The programme? Two days of
waves and tempests, but the ornithologists on board are beaming:
more wind means more albatrosses to spot. Two days, two and
a half, and there you are in icy but calmer waters, waters that
are calmer indeed because of the ice. Yes, you’ve
earned your right to this savage Peninsula, to this mere tip
of a vast white vault that you will barely graze.
Like many other ships going back and forth
between Ushuaia and the Antarctic Peninsula, my expedition cruiser
is “a former Soviet polar research vessel.” That,
at least, is the official version. Not long ago, the Akademik
Ioffe was indeed sailing the Arctic with its high-tech
radio and sonar equipment. But the research had little to do
with whales. No, like many other vessels of the same category,
the Ioffe was no doubt a spy ship, one of the famous
“Russian trawlers” searching for enemy subs and
listening out for their radio messages. Then came the end of
the Cold War, the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the invention
of new technologies, the inevitability of budget cuts, cost-effectiveness,
market economy. So what do you do? You weld a few blocks
of pre-fabricated cabins onto an empty deck, hire a few more
Russian sailors and some Ukrainian hotel staff, and rent the
ship out to an American or Australian tour operator. You end
up with an international crew working together in perfect harmony.
Welcome aboard the S.S. Perestroïka and Glasnost!
The Drake Passage has fuzzy geographical borders.
In one sense, mentally, it comes to an end at the precise
moment you see your first iceberg, still isolated in the distance.
The iceberg is a fuzzy thing as well – in essence an ungraspable
figure, irregular, even irrational in a way.
An iceberg is the exact opposite of a jardin à la
française. There is nothing symmetrical about it;
nothing in it corresponds to expectations, and you never know
how to frame it in your camera, what angle to take, since there
are so many angles that can be taken, so many hidden facets
to try to capture. An iceberg is made of ruptures; it is detached.
It is in its very nature to detach itself and to divide,
again and again. Months ago, perhaps years, this first iceberg
that you’ve spotted after the Drake broke off, detached
itself from some glacier tongue calving into a tranquil blue
bay already spotted with chunks of white. Today it drifts along
with its own bits floating at its base. They too have become
detached. Soon more icebergs are visible on the horizon, a myriad
of fluted or mottled façades, rough or polished, smoothed
where the berg was below the water-line. And now you no longer
rage against the grey skies that have burdened you since Ushuaia,
for it is this very grey that brings out the enchanting and
mysterious blue of the ice. The iceberg would be drab under
a bright tropical sky; here it shines like a monochrome, a subtle
set of shaded tones, an Yves Klein or a Rothko, a little pale,
perhaps, but elegant nonetheless.
Now comes the time of the
first zodiac excursions. The continent is still far off, but
a little cruise is feasible, a prudent tour of the nearest icebergs.
They prove even more difficult to photograph from our embarkations,
rustic yet insubmergible (so say the guides…). You soon
forget about the ice: Two humpback whales have spied our zodiacs.
They surface to take a peek, then a sideways glance, then dive
again, resurface nearby, quite obviously playing with us. The
wide angle lens that you were trying to use to take in the immensity
of the berg becomes a hindrance, and you reach hurriedly for
your zoom. The photographers in the zodiac bump and shuffle
into each other, and then, after a final blow, the humpbacks
dive deep and disappear. On the way back to the ship, the guide
grabs a chunk of ice from out of the sea. “You hear the
crackling? That’s the air inside escaping.” Yes,
air that may be 50 thousand years old or more, caught in the
snow of a glacier far off from us in both time and space. The
guide puts the chunk of bergy bit into the corner of
the zodiac; it will provide the ice cubes for the various cocktails
soon to be on offer: Happy Hour is a veritable institution on
this Australian-run ship.
Polar photography is never easy. You have
to deal with high contrasts in the luminosity, with moving subjects,
complex scenes that are difficult to frame, and meanwhile you
are struggling with the wind and the cold. It’s “summer”
in the Peninsula but that means temperatures ranging between
plus to minus 5°C. If you’re wearing only your glove
liners, you can manage to adjust the dials to choose a setting
or change the aperture. But with only your liners, your fingers
quickly grow numb, especially on the zodiac trips. However,
with your gloves on, well, best be careful! One false move and
a filter, a lens cap, or the other glove (for that matter) drops
into the sea (and the sea doesn’t particularly need your
contribution). One of the guides, an author and photographer
famous in his field, has resigned himself to a tiny digital
camera that he slides out of his life-vest now and then with
little conviction. A zodiac cruise – especially when you’re
the driver – is not the easiest place for professional
photography.
Of course, once you’re
sailing along the Peninsula, what you see from the deck of the
ship is already quite magnificent, and as the waters are still,
the photographer can take his time. The Lemaire Channel is a
must of any Antarctic voyage. In many National Parks in
the U.S., little signs tell you exactly where to take your picture.
They are the official photospots, often sponsored by some famous
brand of film. There is no need for a sign here. The Lemaire
Channel is the photospot par excellence, a compulsory
figure for any amateur artist, the photographic highlight of
the trip (the guides and the guide books make this perfectly
clear). Aside from us tourists, one usually finds, on these
expedition ships, a few expert photographers (and they’re
not necessarily the people dragging around the heaviest equipment…).
Among the passengers of the Ioffe were an official
camera crew from some Australian television network as well
as two eminent wildlife film-makers from the CBC. On the Polar
Star, a Norwegian ice-breaker, I met the former Head of the
BBC’s Natural History Unit who now works as a guide and
lecturer for his own pleasure. Near the official photospots,
these professionals can get just as excited as anybody else.
But you’ll often see them on deck, cold, alone and very
busy, busy making a few minor masterpieces, even when there
doesn’t seem to be anything to see, when the rest of us
are in the lounge listening to the crackle of age-old ice cubes
in our drinks.
The Peninsula and
the islands grouped along it are havens for penguins and seals.
Stretched out on the flat ledge of a low iceberg or on a rock,
a seal will gaze at you with a slightly sleepy curiosity but
will dive if the zodiac gets too close. If seals are often best
seen from the sea, the landings are a festival of penguins.
Their colonies (Adelies, Gentoos, Chinstraps) are a pure frenzy.
Think of Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday afternoon. Or rush
hour at Grand Central. There are penguins coming and going in
all directions, calling, shrieking, walking, sliding. We’ve
been told the guidelines – all is clear: “Always
remain at least 5 metres away from a penguin. You mustn’t
trouble them.” So you sit down (if you’ve managed
to find a clean rock, a bit of relatively unsoiled snow), you
keep your distance, and calmly observe. The problem is that
no one has explained the 5-metre rule to them. If you
don’t move, they’ll often waddle up to
you. The chicks, especially, are curious. Here’s one that
wants to peck at my hiking boots. But he loses interest and
off he goes. The Chinstraps seemed the most courageous. In a
colony situated somewhere along the Danco Coast, they nested
way above sea level, on the bare rock of the highest ridge.
Every day, all day long, to feed themselves and to feed their
chicks, they had to waddle up and down the slope, back and forth
on the same path furrowed in the snow. These pink tracks are
called Penguin Highways. The colour, of course, comes
from their staple diet. Krill being a kind of tiny
pinkish shrimp, you don’t need to be Einstein to figure
things out.
The
finest picture, the most stunning wildlife documentary –
these will never fully capture the sublime intensity of an Antarctic
experience. They have no hold on its odours, for example.
If you can eventually grow accustomed to the fragrance of the
penguins, the blow of a whale (for it comes as much from its
intestines as from its lungs) remains quite frankly unbearable.
Three or four nights on the Peninsula and
it is time to go. You’ve earned your visit to Antarctica,
but on the way back the Drake provokes no enthusiasm. So you
start to think of the distances, the immense distances, that
you’ll have to cover, from the last of the South Shetland
Islands that you’ve just left behind, to Ushuaia, then
the flight for Buenos Aires, and then on to Europe and home.
You shouldn’t complain. Think of the Arctic Tern –
it does the journey back and forth between the two polar regions
every year, some 35000 kilometres by the mere force of its wings.
And remember how lucky you have been to have sighted a few of
these frail yet hardy figures down here, in this extreme and
extremely beautiful region that could almost make you forget
how fragile and threatened our planet is.
Ronald Shusterman
When he is not cruising
around in Zodiacs, Ronald Shusterman works for AERES, a government agency in Paris and is Professor of English
at the Université of Montpellier (France) where he specializes
in Literature, Literary Theory and Philosophy.
