Antarctic Attitudes

I fall for it every time. I read a book written by one of the Antarctic explorers, and then they mention seals and penguins, and their joy at encountering the animals. I know how that feels, I think, because I've felt that joy. I know what it is like to land on Aitcho Island and be welcomed by a huge crowd or Gentoo and Chinstrap Penguins carelessly ignoring you and going about their own business, raising their young. I've sailed into the Lemaire Channel, with the Mate navigating through the ice, full of Leopard Seals, and half the people on the ship standing on deck filming or taking pictures. I've enjoyed the sight of seeing Skuas and Giant Petrels flying high above my head, inspecting the penguin colonies. I mean, what can you do apart from just stand there and be amazed by the sight.

Well, you can do what Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton and all the others did. They may have enjoyed the sight of a Weddell Seal coming out of a hole in the ice, or the sight of Emperor Penguins heading for their colony, but what they saw was meat. What they did was kill the animals, so they would have the food they needed to survive and not to succumb to scurvy. When I was reading Shackleton's "South" it took me a while to catch on to this, being a vegetarian this is a totally foreign way of thinking to me. It is a bit like my always explaining to people how to get to my house on foot, by bike or by public transport, and not by car. I don't have a car and I wouldn't know how to get around this city in one. But that is something else again.

It is impossible to go back to that way of thinking from where we are now, even though all this happened just around 100 years ago. Nowadays the Antarctic is seen and treated differently from 100 years ago, and none of the people on the ship think of food when they see the animals. Then again, I do get asked about the taste of penguin meat and penguin eggs...

Amundsen was evidently a great fan. I've been reading his diaries of the Belgica expedition, and at the moment they contain little else than descriptions of seals and penguins spotted, killed and eaten. And he talks about the weather a lot. I guess you would do under those circumstances. There just are very few personal thoughts or ideas, and relatively little about other people. This is a man who knows what he wants to achieve, who knows where he wants to go, and who will not be distracted. I've nearly finished this one, and then I will read Frederick Cook's book on the same expedition, and I wonder what idea of the expedition I will get from that.