No offense to those guys but I think I would have done OK on the 1898 Antarctic Expedition
Let's let the fiskeboller do the talking tonight
I know the premise of this newsletter is (loosely) that I group a few books together to talk about them but unfortunately for all of you,
You’ve already given me your emails and
I really want to talk about Madhouse at the End of the Earth.
Everything about Julian Sancton’s account of the Belgica Antarctic Expedition, when 19 men set off on an unprecedented voyage to Antarctica in 1897, has bored itself into my brain word by word. His research was aided by the fact that at least 10 of the men kept journals (including one who got Ice Madness and was convinced his crewmates had a long-con plan to murder him, but that one was burned to spare everyone from being exposed to his thoughts I guess).
I know you can probably imagine that a two-year voyage that got turned into a three-year voyage as the ship became the first one in history to spend the winter that far south, trapped in solid pack ice for over a year in a place that has a 72-day night, is pretty haunted. But I’m here to tell you it’s so much more haunted than that even.
Mystery Polar Illness
Most of the men, shortly after getting trapped in the pack ice in a world of endless dusk, started experiencing what I’m going to call “heart randomness,” their resting heart rates leaping to 150bpm or plummeting to 40 for seemingly no reason. Other symptoms included shredded attention spans, depression, memory issues, and “the tendency to stare blankly and unresponsively into the middle distance.”
These symptoms are still found in people who spend extended time in the Antarctic today, especially the stare, which doctors refer to as “the Antarctic Stare.” One physician described it as “a twelve-foot stare in a ten-foot room.”
The ship’s cat, Nansen, also got Polar Madness, by the way.
Part of the illness onboard could be ascribed to scurvy. The onboard supply of invariably gray and mushy canned food, prepared by the commandant’s attendant who had lyingly put “cooking” on his resume, was described as “ambitious” but not, uh, “good.” The ship’s doctor, Frederick Cook, wrote that “His soups are full of ‘mystery.’”
The only food the men had access to that would give them the Vitamin C they needed to keep from getting scurvy was a bunch of penguins they had initially killed mostly out of boredom but didn’t really want to eat (on account of tasting even worse than the other food) so had just tucked into the pack ice like some Worst Case Scenario jerky. Nobody wanted to eat these so a bunch of people willingly still were having scurvy the whole time, especially the commandant, who was the one responsible for purchasing all of the canned food and had a chip on his shoulder about cheating on it, or something. He was the scurviest one of all, but maybe this was also because Cook, who was the photographer as well as the doctor, was using a room that vented into the commandant’s quarters to develop film with a very toxic cyanide-based solution. Can’t have helped!
Another symptom, disordered sleeping, could certainly be at least partially blamed on the fact that this is the weirdest sleeping scenario ever devised. The sun set on May 17 and didn’t rise again until late July. This was great news for the generations of night-loving rats that had thrived onboard since disembarking from South America and the hold was never truly quiet as they scrabbled around in the walls.
This was in addition to the constant sounds of the pack ice which could, at any second, shift in a way that crushed the ship entirely before sinking it to the icy depths (this is what usually happens to ships from the 1800s that explore the Arctic!). Here’s what the resident geologist wrote:
"Often... lying in my berth, I put my ear to the wall and listened to hear what was happening a long way off.”
Here are some of the things that Sancton says the scientist heard:
“Sometimes a resonant metallic clang, like a tightly wound spring suddenly snapping; sometimes something more organic, like the gurgling stomach of a ravenous beast. Even more maddening were the deep, booming sounds of the terrible pressures convulsing the pack during this period.
By the way, the ice did move in a big way in mid-May, permanently hoisting up the front of the ship (I technically have a boating license valid in the state of North Carolina, so I can confirm this is called “the Bow”) so the ship was resting at a jaunty angle the rest of the year it was stuck there.
And another thing about ice
I have more to say about the ice. Because it’s basically all of the things that are in Antarctica. It’s the ground and the terrain and the landscape and the sky, which makes orientation incredibly difficult. Members of the expedition would find themselves stretching to step over a bulge in the snow that was actually a mountain far away, or trip over what they thought was a distant iceberg that was actually at their feet. The ice crystals floating in the air, combined with the location at the bottom of the globe, would create dupes of the sun and brilliant intersecting orbs across the sky and dozens of other optical illusions. One day some of the explorers spent seven hours walking toward an iceberg that they thought was a few miles away (it was actually past the horizon and was just being refracted to appear closer).
The Screams
Ok here’s one thing. Once when he was below deck, one man heard a series of “three or four long, terrible screams.” He rushed into the hallway and ran toward the origin of the sound, running into the doctor and a sailor, who had also heard it. They couldn’t find anyone down there and, when asked, nobody anywhere else on the ship had heard the screams. Nobody ever found out what this was about!
Insane Coworkers
Imagine you were in this situation but you also had a coworker that was just being a complete sicko about the whole thing. The 24-year-old first mate, Roald Amundsen, was obsessed with polar exploration (he was the one who named the cat Nansen after a Norwegian polar explorer), used every setback as a learning opportunity, and got incredibly horny over any chance to suffer. If something was for sure going to suck shit, he was amped about it.
Remember what I said about everyone hating the food? He Loved this shit. Kjottboller, spongy canned meatballs that were everyone else’s least favorite food, weren’t even gross enough for this guy. He preferred THE FISH VERSION that nobody else would even touch unless they’d lost a bet.
Remember how everyone specifically hated eating penguin? This guy loooooved it. He would eat this shit raw. "The food is excellent in every way," he wrote in his diary. “The most delicious steak you could wish for," was his review of penguin. He wrote this in his DIARY. His innermost thoughts. Were lies about penguin meat being good. This is him BTW.
In his diary he also made secret plans for the spring after the ship got free, to travel south through the continent on foot, camping on icebergs, until ultimately coming up the other side and kayaking to Australia over the open ocean (this is not possible, btw, for like 90 reasons). One day he watched an iceberg fully flip over, opened his diary, and wrote “"I will not allow my plan to spend the winter on an iceberg to be influenced by this."
I think I would have done OK
Ok here’s the thing. The people who went the least insane on this expedition were Amundsen (already insane, see above review of fish balls) and Cook, who didn’t have time to go insane between all his anthropology (secretly studying the madness of the people on the ship), photography (slowly poisoning the commandant), and teaming up with Amundsen to come up with a sick new kind of tent or pants with wolf fur in them.
One of the two scientists onboard, a Romanian zoologist named Emil Racoviță, took time in between his regular work of putting stuff in jars and writing it down to draw a daily cartoon. These usually featured the other scientist, a very serious geologist named Henryk Arctowski, having a huge ass and getting pooped on by birds and stuff. I am not joking. Here’s one of him looking solemnly at the aurora australis, the Southern Lights, as it spells out a cuss word.
Here’s one where Arctowski’s butt is a barometer.
All I’m saying is there’s no way to know for sure but I think I would have been the butt drawings guy on the boat. Or at least the “chronicling my coworkers’ descent into madness and coming up with pants designs” guy. It seems pretty obvious that staying busy is the key here and I have never been bored a day in my life. Have I worked my complete refusal to experience cold or my medical need to watch TV into this calculation? Of course not! Anyway let me know what guy you think you would be on this boat.
I know some of you are Scurvy Commandant.