“There Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land; and at his gills
Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.”
- Paradise Lost, Milton
There are moments in Antarctica when you think you have just about begun to understand its size and complexity. These moments are invariably followed by a series of events that turn your heart inside out and leave you slack-jawed in befuddlement.
Not that they'll help you to understand, but let these factoids wash over you: as an average, Antarctica is the highest continent on Earth. If the snow and ice were somehow removed, it would be yet higher again – by several hundred metres according to people who know how to calculate such things. Think about that: think about some who's seven foot tall taking off a led jacket made and instantly growing to eight feet. Think about it while you look at this picture.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
It's impossible to grasp that kind of scale or weight. Or it was for us until we came across tabular icebergs. These town-sized chunks of ice slide right off glaciers and into the sea, seeming neatly cut like generous portions of a titanic ice-cream cake.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Having stayed up to see what colours the White Continent turns as the sun rises/sets, we're pretty exhausted when the bing-bongs of the ship announce its time to start getting up. Due to our enforced retreat, we're actually only a few miles out at sea from Hope Bay, where we began yesterday. Over breakfast that lack of progress sounds like something of a disappointment. Now, the first order of the day will be to take a zodiac around these colossal icebergs. That sounds like something of a miracle. One of the truly remarkable things about Antarctica is that no two trips here are ever the same, and even doing something relatively ordinary like taking a dinghy out in the ocean can provide people with memories to last a lifetime.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
They say you can only see 10 percent of an iceberg's volume above the water. If that's true of these things, they must be terrifying indeed; most are larger than the one that sunk the Titanic... hell, many are bigger than the Titanic. Some have a profile three or four stories tall – approximately the same height as the block of flats I grew up in. Yet, instead of clatty, robbing scheme rats, these are surrounded by occasional penguins and smaller, more delicate icebergs; instead of being decorated with the vomit of the worst mosaics known to man, these tell the tale of their birth through glorious strata; instead of being a hive of scum and villainy that I'd gladly have bulldozed, these things – these hundred-year-old chunks of ice – undo the fabric of my brain.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Puttering around them on our puny Zodiac has a total unreality to it, and what had been incredible from afar the day before, now genuinely confuses my eyes. One of the most well known myths in film history is that when the Lumiere Brothers screened L'arrivee D'un Train a la Ciotat in 1895, the footage of a locomotive chuntering towards the screen sent viewers hurtling from their seats as they desperately tried to avoid certain death.
It seems laughable now, but for the first time I sympathise – floating around in front of a 25m iceberg isn't like watching Toy Story or The Matrix for the first time, where I was astonished, but could just about understand what was happening. Here in the near-frozen sea my brain, like those French dandies, can't fully process what's happening. I see, but I do not understand.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
In order to get to our next location – Astrolabe, which sounds like a sci-fi set piece, rejected on account of its pish name – we have to spend most of the afternoon sailing around the Antarctic Peninsula. People fritter away the time eating, playing cards and talking international pish.
Astrolabe, when we finally get there, looks like it's been dug from the earth by a titan's fingernails: it's enormous, sheer with angry cliffs and utterly inhospitable to human life. For coastal seabirds, however, it is a perfect nesting ground.
All of that, though, becomes largely incidental when the cry of “whale!” goes up for the second time. Again it seems that luck is against us: although there's a pod of three humpbacks within sight, we're scheduled to be on the last zodiac into the water. With only three serviceable boats, and double that amount of passengers, it seems certain we'll miss out. I daren't meet Wee Mo's gaze.
But these South Americans have nothing if not their sense of fairness, and before too long they've radioed to demand the return of the boats so that we stragglers can get a glimpse.
Everything happens in a bit of a panic, people are understandably excited, almost to the point of utter recklessness. One of the first things Wee Mo taught me in as part of My Big Photography Education was, like a goddamn marine with his rifle, you protect your camera at all costs. So as the waves rise up around us to meet Nikon this and Olympus that, our Canons remain under wraps in our dry-bags.
Our driver speaks little English, but he does understand how much people want to get a glimpse of the whales and so, almost certainly against company orders, he pushes our boat just a little closer, perfectly in time to have all of the giants come to the surface.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
The sky is leaden, the whales almost black and the sea is comfortably the roughest we've experienced in the zodiac. All of this makes accurate photography (and video) almost impossible. Neither are helped by the childish lack of cool shown by those on the boat, who stand, push, shove, and blurt out absolutely fucking idiotic commentary for their shit “adventure tourism” video, some of which may or may not have been (it was) in Hebrew.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Still, Wee Mo gets her whales and a couple of photos of which she can be proud. And seeing these things so close is quite overwhelming; all together it's a day for feeling very wee in the face of awesome nature.
“Tongue and pen fail in attempting to describe the magic...” So wrote Ernest Shackleton on his 1908 Nimrod expedition. And he's right, especially on days like this. Instead I'll leave that to ma wee pal Frank, fae Paisley, via 40 years in Toronto. “That,” he says with wide-eyed glee, “was fucking awesome.”