Breaking the polar ice was never easy

Rorke Bryan has produced a wonderful book, says Tim Severin , about the ships that brought explorers — and tourists — to the ends of the earth

Ordeal By Ice

Rorke Bryan

Collins Press,

€39.99, no ebook

IMAGINE being trapped for months in a hut no bigger than a large garage. Outside it is pitch dark and so bitterly cold that you must struggle into four or five layers of clothing before it is safe to venture outside. The wind shrieks over your hut at gale force, shaking the roof, making the frame creak. Your food is from tins and packets, plain, monotonous, and constipating. Your clothes are scratchy and damp. The air inside the hut is fuggy, and you dream of a long, hot soaking bath.

Everything is rationed: food, fuel, sheets of paper. Communication with the outside world is intermittent and, anyhow, what is there to say?

You watch the calendar as one uncomfortable day drags into the next. Finally the sun begins to show above the horizon. The wind eases. You venture outside into a world cloaked with frozen snow. Slowly the snow melts in dirty streaks and patches, revealing dark, barren rock underneath. Whenever you leave the hut you squint northward across a rumpled expanse of sea ice dotted here and there with icebergs the size of apartment blocks.

More weeks crawl by and, at long last, the ice sheet begins to break up. In the farthest distance a tiny dot appears, black against the white dazzle that hurts your eyes. Slowly it approaches, a ship slowly butting and grinding a path through the ice floes. You begin to make out details: she is blocky, ungainly, painted a harsh red, cranes and derricks stick out at odd angles, the deck are heaped with crates and large containers, black smoke and fumes ooze from her funnel and leave a dingy plume in the still air. The vessel is as ugly as anyone could imagine. Yet you do not care. The ship has come to re-supply your Antarctic observation hut and take you home. To you she is a beauty.

Rorke Bryan spent years working for the British Antarctic Survey and it shows in his affection and high regard for the vessels which ply those hostile seas. He has put together a valuable survey of the craft that have ventured deep into the Southern Ocean — from the whalers, sealers, supply ships, ice breakers, to the cruise liners that now deliver camera-toting passengers to the shores of the frozen continent.

His enthusiasm for his subject matter is matched by the compliments paid to their vessels by their captains in the age of sail. Captain Cook said of his barque Resolution that he “never set foot in a finer vessel”.

Bryan, writing of the mariners who went south in search of fortunes from blubber and sealskin, points out how remarkably few of their small, frail craft were lost. He also reminds us that a man from County Cork, Edward Bransfield, is a contender for being the first to sight the southern continent.

But all that was to change in what Bryan dubs the “Heroic Age” and the “Exploration Rush” that culminated in the race to the South Pole. A new vessel, specially designed and built for the job, was almost unheard of. There was rarely enough cash in hand. Usually it was a matter of scouting around and finding something vaguely suitable at second-, third — or even 20th hand. Time and again the choice was a beaten-up hull that had done much service in the whaling, sealing or general trade.

Purchased as cheaply as possible, the scarred veteran was strengthened with internal cross bracing and belted externally with layer upon layer of extra planking or iron sheeting to fend off the ice. Masts were shortened and sail area reduced in deference to the fierce gales that the Southern Ocean would inflict. Then, grossly overloaded with dogs, Manchurian ponies, hay, sleds, portable huts, coal, and tons of stores and scientific equipment the vessels plodded off for the southern continent. Most were atrocious sailors, sluggish, unhandy, and prone to rolling hideously. Typically they had to make stops en route to repair leaks and fix breakages. Vessels were still using masts and sails to help them reach the edge of the polar region, but at that point their engines, weak, unreliable, and often experimental, were meant to push them onward. Unsurprisingly the engines often failed, and adventures resulted — tales that are recounted succinctly and well.

Shackleton and Tom Crean get their fair dues in this splendid book, and so do other less familiar names — notably the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Charcot.

As time went on, more sensible designs and funding slowly became available. Bryan traces this gradual evolution, showing how it reflected changing motives for bringing vessels to the Antarctic — commercial whaling, territorial claims, scientific research.

National governments and learned societies replaced dreamers and glory seekers. Vessels became more and more specialised until today they have ingenious technology. The Russian ice-breaking vessel Kapitan Khlebnikov (built by the Finns who know about these things) even blows bubbles around the hull to reduce ice friction as she smashes through the ice.

Tellingly, Kapitan Khlebnikov has spent most of her working years in the service of Antarctica’s new ‘exploration rush’. She carries fee-paying tourists, not the scientists for which she had been designed. This irony allows Bryan to deliver a final sobering warning: what would happen if a very large cruise ship got into trouble far south in those icy seas ? Smaller vessels have suffered accidents, notably the veteran MV Explorer — known affectionately as ‘the little red ship’ — holed and sunk by ice in November 2007. No lives were lost because sea conditions were benign and two other cruise ships were nearby to take off her crew and passengers. But if the stricken vessel had been isolated, with a gale blowing ? What then?

The book is lavish with illustrations and Collins Press has been generous in providing good quality paper and fine printing so that they are shown to advantage. For the technically minded there are hull and rig plans, sheer lines, profiles, and cross sections. The general reader will relish the mass of black and white photographs assembled from archives across the world.

A prodigious amount of research has gone into tracing information about the real heroes of this book, the vessels themselves. Here you can find about their design, construction, performance, and final fate. For that reason alone, this book is an essential for anyone with more than a passing interest in the Antarctic.