Floating Among the Islands and Icebergs of the Antarctic Peninsula

Sailing southward down the scoliotic, fractured spine of the Antarctic Peninsula aboard the M.V. Marco Polo, I got a sense of what it might be like to dally with a mild and very pleasant madness. The delineations and markers that I’d always taken for granted as means to gauge things like time, shape, size, and distance—the accoutrements of a reasonable mind—began to smudge, fade, or disappear altogether once we’d crossed Drake’s Passage and began cruising among the glaciated, volcanic, or merely rock-strewn hunks of land that lie off the peninsula’s western edge.

Nighttime, no longer defined by darkness, became more of a concept than a reality. Gray mists and long, pale cloud-strands obscured mountaintops and mimicked the horizon, making everything beyond the ship’s deck a nearly colorless floating world at whose dimensions I could only guess. Icebergs could resemble crouching lions, or distant desert palaces, or—no less marvelous--icebergs. At times it became hard to tell whether the ship was moving, or the land was moving, or nothing was moving at all.

It wasn’t much easier to will my mind into perceiving this place as a reality here than it had been at home, when I would stand staring at its pale-blue, shattered rendering on the National Geographic map on my son’s bedroom wall. In the evening (when the sky might have darkened ever so slightly) I’d sit in the ship’s Polo Lounge with a glass of Calvados, watching the passing seascapes and landscapes through the windows, and silently repeat to myself: I’m in Antarctica. This is the only place in the world that no one owns. This is the farthest south that I will ever be. I’m in Antarctica.

It rarely worked, and when it did, I was confronted with a disconcerting question: should such a fragile place be written about in such a way that might encourage others to come? It was, of course, a question I’d had to deal with at other times as a travel writer, but never with such a sense that there was so much riding on my answer. (Not that there are millions of readers counting the moments until my next pronouncement about where they should go, but every so often I seem to make an impression—and, in a place inhabited for the most part by only penguins, whales, seals, sea lions, and seabirds, every so often could make all the difference.)

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Allan Morgan, Expedition Leader for our 8-night Antarctic journey aboard the Marco Polo, gave an orientation talk on the rules and procedures for getting off the ship on the second afternoon of the cruise.

“I’m glad to see that so many of you have joined us for the mandatory briefing,” he greeted those of us who had shown up with his deadpan, Robert Redford affect. With help from the other members of his team, he demonstrated what fifteen feet looks like for those of us with less-than-perfect grasps of measurement (we were, he explained in no uncertain terms, not to get closer than that to the wildlife we came across unless they approached us of their own volition). He explained why wool socks are preferable to cotton ones, the procedures in place for getting penguin guano off our boots, how to get on and off the inflatable zodiac boats that would take us to shore, and how long one might survive if he or she fell out of the zodiac and into the freezing waters of Antarctica (bottom line on that: don’t fall). He made it abundantly clear that, here in Antarctica, the comfort level of the wildlife took precedence over the comfort of human visitors; the continuing survival of the animals depended on it, whereas, at the end of the day, we humans could return to our cozy ship, shower, have dinner, and get a good night’s sleep.

At the end of the orientation session, Allan took questions from the passengers. A hand went up.

“Do I have the right to defend myself if I’m attacked by a penguin or a sea lion?” asked the hand’s owner.

Allan appeared to measure his response very carefully before quietly asking, “What kind of weaponry are you planning to carry?” Next question.

Another young man asked if we were allowed to pet the penguins if they came close enough on their own.

The rest of the audience responded in unison: “NO!” Most of us had, it seemed by then, gotten with the leave-things-as-you-find-them program.

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The first test of how well we’d absorbed Allan’s instructions came on the third afternoon of the cruise, when we reached Cuverville Island. (It was, actually, more of a quiz than a test, as we would only be cruising around the island in zodiacs and not setting foot on land.)

Walking single-file down a long corridor on one of the Marco Polo’s lower decks, outfitted in long underwear, regular and waterproof pants, rubber boots, shirts, sweaters, ship-issued red parkas, gloves, mittens, and hats, we looked like astronauts making their way toward a launch pad; someone should have been playing the music from The Right Stuff. Filipino crew members in insulated orange jumpsuits helped us onto the zodiacs.

Settled safely (to my surprise, as I am nothing if not a klutz) into the zodiac, I looked up and out at what surrounded us, and gasped. If our passage along the peninsula thus far had been a colorless, ghostly dreamscape, this was a Technicolor Munchkinland. From the water, mountains that from the ship had been merely breathtaking were now gargantuan as gods. Icebergs, taking every possible form and punctuated with turquoise striations that appeared to be lit from within, drifted by. There was blue in the sky.
I was so stunned by the magnitude of everything that it took me a minute to notice the Gentoo penguins (I may have noticed the unmistakable—now that I’ve smelled it—smell of penguin guano first). But there were hundreds of them on the rocky shore, and more clambering like toddlers up toward the tops of the island’s hills. Still more, restored to the grace that eluded them on land, performed synchronized dives and leaps in the clear water around us. A seal teased the passengers of a zodiac just ahead of us, who were nearly falling into the water to try to get a shot of her.

And then someone yelled, “Whale!” At lunch, we’d seen dozens of spouts and flipping Humpback flukes alongside the ship. As thrilling as that was, getting close to one in a zodiac would be another thing altogether. We turned just in time to see a fluke disappear into the water, and our zodiac driver took off in its direction.

My instinct, of course, was to yell, “Faster!” or to take control of the zodiac and catch up with the whale at all costs. Still, at the same time, a voice inside my head said, We shouldn’t be chasing him. He’s gone already. The voice, of course, was right. The whale, who passed by shores littered with the skeletons of his slaughtered forebears every day, wasn’t about to hang around for photo ops.

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In the days that followed, we went ashore on islands where it was impossible to be more than fifteen feet away from nesting Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins, the parents standing guard over their chicks, regurgitating krill into the babies’ beaks, stealing pebbles from other penguins’ nests, or simply staring off in some kind of penguin reverie at a spot between the sea and the sky.

During his onboard lecture about the avian wildlife of Antarctica, ornithologist Chris Wilson (whose great-uncle, Edward Wilson, had died along with his expedition-mates while returning from Robin Falcon Scott’s unimaginably tragic 1912 expedition to the South Pole) had shown us a photo of a penguin chick being eaten alive by a predatory seabird. Ashore at Port Lockroy, I told him that the image had haunted me, and that I wouldn’t know what to do if I saw a chick being attacked. Chris reminded me that the chicks of the seabirds had to eat, too.

“It’s hard to know whose side to take,” I said.

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Chris answered. “You can’t take sides.” My natural inclination to interfere, he was politely telling me, would need to be curbed in a place like this.

The Marco Polo’s Expedition Team members, experts in ornithology, marine biology, climatology, geology, and the like, spent their time onshore among the passengers, patiently giving amazingly knowledgeable answers to questions that ranged from clueless to complex.
Every so often, a passenger would cross one of the orange lines set up as delineations between human and penguin territory, taking a “Harry, get a picture of me with the penguins” pose.

“Ma’am,” a team member would say, as if repeating a mantra, “please move back behind the line.”

“We’d rather not be Penguin Police,” Allan Morgan told me during our morning on Half Moon Island, a delicately beautiful mile-and-a-half-long pile of black stones, teeming with Chinstraps. Their time was much better spent when they were explaining to passengers what, exactly, they were looking at as they picked their way among the rocks and penguins with their cameras. I took the opportunity to ask him if he felt that tourism would help or harm Antarctica.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. He told me about a small canyon, known pretty much only to “adventure types,” not far from the Grand Canyon. The canyon had recently been flooded, because not enough people had known about it to protest the flooding. The Grand Canyon, he said, was not likely to meet the same fate, because people knew about it, and would always want to visit it. If Antarctica remained the province of scientists, and was never revealed to the general public, he implied, no one would know that it was a place worth protecting from exploitation. Handled responsibly, tourism might actually help to save Antarctica.

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By the last day of the cruise, passengers—oil executives, retired Naval officers, self-described Nebraska farmgirls, software designers, schoolteachers, and world travelers who had been aching to set foot on Antarctica before they died—wandered around the ship with beatific grins. They raved about penguins with the same affection that they might use to talk about their own children; they complained, in some cases, about spouses who had refused to join them in Antarctica and who had consequently missed what everyone repeatedly referred to as the “trip of a lifetime.” It was as if we’d been collectively lifted off to one of those distant ice palaces by some unseen force and been given a good spiritual cleansing before being sent on our way.

The Expedition Team convened a final panel discussion about the future of Antarctica, which depends to an enormous extent on adherence to the Antarctic Treaty. In effect since 1961, and with 44 nations signed on at present, the Treaty is a framework for keeping Antarctica in its pristine state, protecting wildlife, seeing to it that the continent is used solely for scientific and peaceful purposes, establishing guidelines for responsible tourism, and banning drilling or mining until at least 2048. The Treaty, biologist Neville Jones told us, had been working remarkably well so far; on the other hand, it hadn’t yet been tested very vigorously. Now that we’d seen Antarctica, he suggested hopefully, maybe we would be inspired to be active in supporting the Treaty’s mission.

Allan Morgan, dismissing us at the conclusion of the panel, gave us our orders. “Go,” he said. “You are all now ambassadors for Antarctica.”

And so here I am, hoping that I’m doing the right thing.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008