No one, it’s safe to say, ever took up polar exploration in search of a good time. To trudge through its annals is to confront a decidedly un-hygge variety of experiences. Just look at the titles: Alone on the Ice. In the Land of White Death. The Last Place on Earth. The Worst Journey in the World. The Man Who Ate His Boots. It can’t have been easy to outdo these for lurid horror, but Julian Sancton may have succeeded with Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night. It evokes one of the most frightening hazards of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration: the isolation, confinement, and tedium of overwintering in an icebound vessel.
But this title is also a missed opportunity since the salient point about the Antarctic night isn’t that it’s dark — the night is dark in Margaritaville, too — but that it goes on for half the year. This is the story of how a group of men ended up trapped on the Belgica, a repurposed steam whaler, with little to do in the darkness but drink, eat tinned meat, and glissade into madness. Had Sancton’s book come out a year earlier, it would have made chastening COVID-19-lockdown bedtime reading for children or adults. There is nothing history furnishes in such abundance as a perspective on one’s own hardships.
The voyage of the Belgica, which sailed from Antwerp on Aug. 16, 1897, inaugurated what is known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, which yielded to the Mechanical Age around the same time that World War I mechanized every other kind of misery known to man. As is often the case with heroism, it gave conceptual cover to what was in fact a suicidal and perilous undertaking on “a continent so inimical to human life that no man had yet spent more than a few hours on its shores.” Owing to inexperience, restricted budgets, xenophobic tension within the multinational crew, and a degree of romantic naivete, whatever could go wrong did, and it happened long before the descent of the polar night.
The commandant of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition was Adrien de Gerlache, the scion of an aristocratic military family and a pacifist who’d preferred playing sailor to soldier as a child. By today’s generous standards, he was a child, just 31 years old, when he set out to not only defy nature but manage men, including the massive Norwegian first mate Roald Amundsen (who would go on to become a legend of polar exploration), the physician Frederick Cook (who would end up a disgraced swindler in Leavenworth), and a host of other quarrelsome and unprepared characters. To the Belgian monarchy, de Gerlache claimed that he sought national prestige; to his financial backers, scientific progress; and to himself, personal glory.
Sancton’s narrative is gripping, hand-over-gasping-mouth stuff, even though his prose is par for the course for this kind of mass-market history. It is helped along enormously by copious quotations from the journals and recollections of the crew, which needle the reader with the sense that young men used to be more articulate and reflective, as well as more daring. It is strange to find such exquisite sensitivity, even Ruskinian delicacy, in men capable of superhuman endurance: “Channels trace winding paths of lapis-lazuli, and, on their shores, young ice takes in an aquamarine tint. Towards the evening, imperceptibly, the shadows change, turn a tender pink, a pale mauve, and, behind each iceberg, it seems a passing fairy has hung her veil of gauze.”
Then again, we may attribute this sensitivity to what de Gerlache’s contemporary Max Plowman, writing about World War I, called the “strange emotion that all objects stir when we look upon them wondering whether we do so for the last time in this life.” The voyage seemed doomed from the start. Many of the sailors were violently seasick. Others went mad from overwork. Carl Wiencke, a Norwegian who had grave doubts about his crewmates, recorded that the captain, the Belgian Georges Lecointe, threw one of the ship’s two cats overboard in a rage: “Such behavior doesn’t serve to endear him with the other men.” Later Wiencke himself would be washed overboard to die in convulsions amid a failed rescue attempt. Several unruly, almost mutinous crew members, all Belgians, were expelled from the ship with the assistance of the Chilean navy. It was a black eye for Belgium no matter the expedition’s outcome and a serious blow to the efficacy of the remaining crew.
The men existed in a state of constant peril before and after becoming icebound. Shockingly, the Belgica sailed with a generous store of tonite, a cousin of dynamite, in its hold, on the mostly mistaken belief that it could be used to blast through pack ice if necessary. In a foreign port, the ship took on rats, which became aggressive as supplies dwindled. The Belgica traveled through seas so stormy that they had to be “calmed” by dumping oil onto the waves to dampen wind resistance. It penetrated ice fields that, given the right conditions, could crush a ship like a matchstick model in a vise.
When that ice, in the Bellingshausen Sea, froze up around the Belgica, it was clear that the expedition would, like it or not, get a shot at a “first.” Nobody had ever wintered in Antarctica, nor was the ship well prepared to do so. The crew was put on a strict, unvarying ration of tinned meat purees. Men developed scurvy, which Cook treated with a supplemental diet of raw seal and penguin meat. He also prescribed “fire baths,” standing naked in front of a stove, to combat the effects of sun deprivation or “polar anemia.” But the frontiers of monotony, exhaustion, and hopelessness that these men navigated, wasting away by candlelight, are most horrible to contemplate. “Murder, suicide, starvation, insanity, icy death, and all the acts of the devil,” Cook wrote, “become regular mental pictures.”
Many of the images in Madhouse linger in mind like nightmares half-recalled: a corpse committed to a black hole cut out of the ice; men camped on a disintegrating ice floe, trying not to fall asleep and fall in; Amundsen crouched over a days-old seal carcass, drinking blood from its wound. Even for lovers of such ghoulish or thrilling fare, survival narratives can never be an unalloyed pleasure. Their heroes inspire with their ingenuity and endurance, but they also represent very real yardsticks against which to measure one’s self-regard. The main thing this story ought to inspire in a sane reader is a radically revised sense of his own capabilities.
Of course, at the risk of sounding maudlin, Madhouse also inspires a reverence for the spirit of brotherhood and solicitude that obtains, even among callous or violent men, when they depend upon each other for their lives. These men tried, to the best of their various abilities, to keep each other entertained, fed, nursed, sane, and, when death could be kept at bay no longer, at peace. The indelible scene of Cook giving the men preposterous haircuts, just to provide the least bit of something new and distracting to think about, is heartbreaking.
And even in the midst of all this, natural wonder and scientific curiosity endured, too. Here, the Romanian biologist Emil Racovitza, an inexperienced mountaineer being set upon by angry skuas protecting their nest, makes a climb with an ice ax and fingertips: “One wrong move could mean a fatal fall. His left hand gripping the rock, Racovitza swung wildly with his ice ax. It succeeded in fending off the birds long enough to snatch the tuft of grass he sought before scrambling back down.” It was Deschampsia antarctica, “the southernmost flowering plant in the world … a rare and especially hardy grass able to withstand the cold, the wind, and the paucity of soil.” A perfect symbol of man the explorer and survivor, and of just how little excuse he needs to sail into the unknown, even if coming back alive would be, as it was, a miracle.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
