The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica

Five

Five The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need—if only we had the eyes to see. —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire Driving into town from Lyttelton (as Lytteltonians say when going to Christchurch), cars and huge trucks bearing timber from the west coast zoom through a beige, shiny-tiled tunnel, cut through steep hills descending to the Canterbury Plain, also called the Big Flat, the largest stretch of flat land in New Zealand, then into Christchurch, the commercial and artistic center of the South Island. The hills ringing the port create a natural barrier—the historically workingclass town from the South Island’s largest metropolitan area. This was my path when I had to wrest myself from my home on the tonic slopes of Lyttelton to glue my eyeballs to archival documents. Lyttelton, where I had first lived in 1988, however , while it looked largely unchanged, indeed was slowly absorbing a new wave of immigrants, people taken by the rare views offered by the line of eroding giant volcano against blue sky. People bearing money to transform empty storefronts into wine bars offering goat cheese spread on grilled bread, pan-seared gurnard, and warm chocolate gateau creating 120 * the entire earth and sky a Lyttelton proffered as destination and object, a place to observe and take in and consider rather than a place to work, to unload ships, to drink handles of beer held in rough working -men’s and-women’s hands. Baden had phoned to tell me about a letter penned by James Paton, written from Antarctica while he served aboard Terra Nova. The letter, Baden said, demonstrated the particular insights lower-deck men offered as reporters of simple fact. It also represented the working seaman’s perspective, notably absent from most museum accounts of Antarctic exploration. Cultural memory and historical erasure, things that aren’t monumented and how we don’t remember them. There is no monument anywhere in the world listing the names of all the sailors who traveled to Antarctica. Why do I think there should be? Would those men really care? Why do I? Why does it bother me so much that they are being ground up under the tractor treads of history? Sometimes my research into their lives came to a dead end and I had to find another way forward. My colleague in polar histories, the Canterbury Museum photography curator Kerry McCarthy suggested that photographs—they all owned cameras— offered the best record of working class people. Image telling a story words missed. I studied their faces, their rough boots, rakish hats, strong forearms crossed over muscular chests. They looked directly at the camera and posed with an ease and poise often absent from the “hero construction” set pieces of Antarctic leaders’ photos. Inmanyphotosthemenarenotevenidentifiedbeyond“crew.” In order to inscribe and reinscribe their names someone had towritethemalldown,tocreatesomesortofmonumentfirst in words and so James Paton steps onto the stage. Today as Christchurch-bound cars disappeared into the auto tunnel, the landscape blurred and waving, I thought of five * 121 the tunnel builders’ determined work. The railway tunnel was completed in 1867, a noted feat of engineering and particularly ambitious for a group of people living in a colonial backwater—it was also the first tunnel in the world bored through an extinct volcano. In 1903 Paton was a sailor on the Morning, a ship that served as a resupply vessel for Antarctic expeditions. For a period during the austral summer of 1903, three ships and their crews were within sight of one another in the Ross Sea—a traffic jam of ships, the Discovery, the Morning, and the Aurora. Not just any sailor was chosen as crew for an Antarctic voyage. Rather than mindless drones working behind the scenes, the sailors offered a visceral fragmented narrative, a collage of raw life on Antarctic ships. Their stories added texture to a sea of smooth, glossed accounts. Unlike their leaders, they wrote without guile. Their absence from history reflected class conceit and snobbery and a disinterest in the very fact of exploration itself. I eased into the carpark at Hagley...