I remember well the first time I set foot on Antarctica. It was, amazing as it seems to me, almost exactly 17 years ago: February 11, 1993.
I was co-leader of a Greenpeace expedition to find Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean, visit McMurdo and Scott Bases on Ross Island and complete clear-up at the site of Greenpeace's own World Park Base, which had been completely dismantled the previous year.
I hopped ashore at Cape Evans, and looked at the Terra Nova hut, which had been the base for Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 1910-13 expedition that culminated in his fatal assault on the South Pole. (In the photo above, the roof of the hut can be seen center-right). It was the height of the Antarctic summer, and so there was little snow on the ground around the base. And the impression that immediately struck was of entering a bubble, a small pocket of space that was trapped in time. The cold, dry environment of Antarctica - combined with the relative lack of human presence - helped preserve the area almost exactly as it had been eighty years previously.
On the beach lay the mummified body of a seal. Nearby, the corpse of a sled dog still lay chained to the spot where it had presumably frozen to death eight decades before.
Inside, too, it appeared as if the hut's occupants had just left. Cups hung from hooks attached to shelves that still held row upon row of provisions. On a desk, a dead penguin lay next to a copy of the February 29, 1908 edition of the Illustrated London News.
Farther north, on the eastern coast of Ross Island, on Cape Royds, stood the hut (pictured right) of an earlier expedition, led by Scott's rival Ernest Henry Shackleton. During that expedition, Shackleton and three companions closed to within 112 miles of the South Pole, then a record, before he determined they would not survive a return trip if they pushed all the way south. ("A live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn't it?" he asked his wife afterward; "Yes darling, as far as I'm concerned," she replied).
I never made it to Cape Royds or to Shackleton's hut, although the news this week highlights its own time capsule properties. During ongoing preservation efforts, conservators with the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust have uncovered, beneath the hut, five crates of whisky and two of brandy. Although ice had cracked some of the bottles, restorers are confident the crates still contain century-old whisky, "given liquid can be heard when the crates are moved."
The master blender at Whyte and Mackay, which made the whisky for the expedition, said that if the contents had been preserved, and could be extracted and analyzed, it would be a "gift from the heavens" as that particular recipe has been long lost. If it can be replicated, it is the only way the wider world will be able to taste the whisky that Shackleton drank; under Antarctic Treaty guidelines, the crates and their contents must remain where they lie - serving, like the penguin in Scott's hut to the south, as a window on a moment frozen in time.
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