THE GREAT WHITE SOUTH

Vast, unknowable, virtually uninhabitable: Antarctica has, for generations of explorers, represented the ultimate challenge. On a journey inspired by one of the continent’s most infamous expeditions, Stanley Stewart finds a place both profoundly awe-inspiring and profoundly vulnerable

- Stanley Stewart

SOUTH AMERICA disappeared while I was at dinner. In the dwindling twilight, our ship had been haunting the coast of Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago that makes up the continent’s southernmost tip. I had wanted to see Cape Horn, once the end of the known world, but had lingered too long over the roast lamb with that wonderful Pinot Noir. When I eventually went out on deck, South America had slipped astern.

The night was black and rain-swept; I needed to hold the rail to keep my feet. Standing in the open bow, away from the candlelight and the pressed linen, and the reassuring murmur of conversation, there was a sense of uneasy anticipation. A heaving, whitecapped sea unfurled streaks of spray. We were in the Drake Passage, one of the planet’s most fearsome stretches of sea. I peered into the darkness. It was as if we were sailing beyond the normal parameters of our world. I thought of the explorers of the early 20th century who made this same crossing in small wooden ships, brave but perhaps a little deranged.

It took humankind a while to find Antarctica. For a couple of millennia, civilisations from ancient Greece to Polynesia talked of Terra Australis Incognita—the Unknown Southern Land—as little more than a rumour. In 1773, Captain Cook groped his way through the fog and icebergs of the Southern Ocean, hoping to stumble upon the continent. He returned defeated, and unimpressed. Whatever is down there, he wrote, was “doomed by nature.”