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Published: February 24th 2014
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Heading Up To Laguna Esmeralda
The glacier our final destination is in the background. Just a few short hours before we set sail. The good news is the weather looks like it's set fair so I am hopeful of a smooth crossing.
Attached are few photos of my final day´s walking around Ushuaia - Laguna Esmeralda - beautiful but cold. I walked with a retired police officer and his wife (a fitness instructor) from Guildford - both charming. Travel makes for strange bedfellows!
And so to Antarctica...and something about my state of mind...
"We find after years of struggle that we do not take trips. A trip takes us." (John Steinbeck)
"For scientific leadership give me Scott, for swift and efficient travel give me Amundsen. But when you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton" (Sir Raymond Priestley)
Shackleton, Scott etal. were the brightest and best, the most forward-thinking of their generation and yet for all their striving they were soon to be rendered anachronistic by history - perhaps this is part of the appeal. Their explorations and experiences only seem to have added to Antarctica´s mystery. Now, of course, arguably our last great wilderness. Their
Laguna Esmeralda
About to walk round the lake, through the woods and start the scramble up to the glacier. stories are overwhelming narratives of failure - Shackleton´s attempted transmigration, over before it had really begun, ending in a desperate attempt to survive; Scott´s expedition successful in its objective but defeated in the race to the pole and achieved at the cost of the lives of all 5 of the polar party. Successes in polar exploration are hard-won and temporary, the result of an elemental struggle to sustain human life. And yet this seems only to have enhanced the attraction of Antarctica, to fire the imagination.
To me these Edwardian gentlemen seem risk-takers, scientists, adventurers and would-be glory hunters. And in the latter they succeeded perhaps beyond their wildest dreams so that 100 years on they are now frozen in time - the last of certain type of adventurer, permanently on the cusp of a world about to change forever. When news reached England that Scott and his party had (1) been beaten to the Pole by Amundsen and (2) had perished on the return journey it was greeted as a national catastrophe, plunging the nation into grief. Just a year or so later World War I would transform the context in which we read these stories. Shackleton offered
to postpone his transmigration so that he and his men could contribute to the war effort. They were turned down on the basis that the war was likely to be a triffling affair and need not stand in the way of the scientific progress and the glory for which they were bound.
And now, for me, as I think about Antarctica it seems, not despite but because of these "explorations", terra incognito, an unknown land, on which the imagination projects great beauty and great heroism. Reading the stories of these men again in Shackleton´s "South" or Cherry-Gerrard´s "The Worst Journey In the World" their stories of hardship, endurance, stiff upper lip and ideas of Christian service and sacrifice speak of another time, but this does nothing to detract from the pull of the story or the lure of the place.
It will be quite an experience to follow, all be it almost infinitely tangentially, in such footsteps and to look on the landscapes that these explorers describe and know how little they have changed.
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