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He didn’t know what to expect from the Antarctic ice, only that a continent that had succeeded in staving off humanity until the nineteenth century demanded respect.
De Gerlache presumed that a half ton of tonite would more than suffice to break the grip of the sea ice. It was the first time he underestimated the power of Antarctica, but it would not be the last.
They included a navy mechanic, Joseph Duvivier, whose superior officer wrote a letter of recommendation that read much more like a warning: “In summation, it is possible that Mr. Duvivier might figure out how to work a very simple engine, like the Belgica’s, but I cannot guarantee it.” De Gerlache hired him.
Another Belgian applicant was Louis Michotte, a twenty-eight-year-old ne’er-do-well who had just returned from a five-year stint in Africa with the French Foreign Legion, during which a local man had bitten off one of his thumbs.
On the twenty-eighth, before the captain’s arrival, the ship ran aground on a sandbar off the port town of Den Helder. Lecointe wondered what he’d gotten himself into: if the crew couldn’t negotiate well-charted European waters, how could they handle the unknown perils of the Antarctic?
Around the same time, the commandant brought on a hulking, irascible French cook named Albert Lemonnier, who had a fondness for drink and a tendency to insult everyone within earshot.
He heard a knock out front. When Cook opened his door, the Western Union boy thrust in his hand a ticket to the world of his secret dreams.
“If one must live in the Arctic, the sooner he reverts to habits of the wilderness folk, the better.”
Three weeks later, after crossing the Labrador Sea to Greenland, the Miranda smashed into a reef, causing another panic on board. “I reckon we been sounding with the keel,” one sailor told Cook.
Jens took on a mythical aura in his son’s mind, one Roald strove to live up to. He would forever be chasing a legend.
To Amundsen, Nansen’s blessing of the expedition felt like an induction into the small club of polar explorers.
The unhumbled mechanic shouted back at his captain, stormed out past the Brazilian visitors, and lurched toward the forecastle. He screamed at Amundsen, calling him, in so many words, a fucking Norwegian.
As the crew wrestled with Duvivier, the Brazilians must have wondered how on earth this bunch would survive Antarctica if they could barely make it out of Rio alive.
Cook, who had been so unimpressed by the Belgica when he first saw her in Guanabara Bay, had a change of heart. “As she takes us farther and farther away from our homes, we become daily more dependent upon her,” he wrote. “She already has a place in our affections as definitely as a pet horse.”
De Gerlache entrusted kitchen duties to his personal attendant, the well-meaning but culinarily inept Louis Michotte, a move that would have severe consequences for the men’s well-being once they were in Antarctica.
The Belgica sailed into the labyrinth of mountainous islands at the tip of South America on December 14 with nineteen men and an unknown number of rats aboard.
He had succeeded in attracting the world’s attention to his Antarctic endeavor; if he failed to clear even the tip of South America, he would forever be remembered as an embarrassment to his country and his family.
The ordeal had lasted twenty-two hours. Cook would later quip that the reef they’d struck had been “the Belgica’s first geographical discovery.”
Nature always claims what she’s owed.”
Cook’s photographs were likely the first ever taken of Antarctica.
Dueling chinstrap penguins “looked from afar like two fishmongers questioning the respective freshness of the other’s merchandise.”
In three weeks, Racovitza collected specimens from more than 400 species of plants, animals, fungi, algae, and diatoms, 110 of which were unknown to science.
Long after the rope that linked them on the cliffside was untied, the bond that formed between Amundsen and Cook that day would remain unbreakable.
Lecointe, Racovitza, Arctowski, Danco, and Cook rowed to its base, bringing the total number of landings to twenty, more than all previous expeditions to Antarctica combined.
The sound of the sea gradually freezing around the ship was alarming to several of the men on board, particularly the scientists. Each day, entrapment grew more likely.
But on the morning of February 28, a violent storm shattered the edge of the pack. Floes parted and leads opened up, inviting the Belgica in and presenting de Gerlache with a fleeting opportunity to pierce deep into the heart of the Antarctic sea ice.
It was only then that Lecointe learned how close he had come to shooting the expedition’s doctor, and that Cook discovered how narrowly he had avoided being killed for his hide and blubber.
More enthused by his horn playing than his shipmates were, Adélie penguins waddled right up to the Belgica, where they were brutally ambushed. “It seems that penguins are musical animals,” Amundsen observed.
He also took a liking to their yet more reviled cousins, fiskeboller, fish balls, which were served on Fridays but were typically eaten only on a lost bet.
Since his adolescence, when he held the doomed explorer John Franklin in reverence, Amundsen had equated suffering with accomplishment, to the point where it didn’t feel like suffering anymore.
Sexual conquests were of less interest to him than geographical ones. He found little use in activities that didn’t help him fulfill his polar ambitions. Every second he spent in the pack brought him closer to his goal.
The relentless wind hounded the men, screamed their fate back at them.
The cartoonist showed Artocho solemnly observing a magnificent aurora borealis that spells out M-E-R-D-E (shit), or pontificating to a band of indifferent penguins, one of whom sprays him with guano.
Lecointe raised his voice, saying he couldn’t care less about the press, “especially the Antarctic press,” and urged the expedition leader to provide sufficient rations “without worrying about the rags from temperate zones.”
Arctowski put it more succinctly: “We are in a mad-house.”
Amundsen, who dreamed of being a world-famous polar explorer in the mold of Fridtjof Nansen, approached the expedition as training.
“Scurvy had a thousand remedies,” Cook wrote, “which in itself is the best evidence that it was not understood.”
Lecointe’s English was as hopeless as Cook’s French, and neither spoke Norwegian.
It had been assumed that since a violent storm had allowed the ship to break into the ice, only an equally powerful storm would allow her to leave. Most of the Belgica’s men, therefore, consigned their fate to the Antarctic winds.
This ring of detritus—which included animal carcasses and human feces—had absorbed the sun’s rays and melted the top layer of snow beneath it, forming a vile swamp atop the hard, thick sea ice.
“But now that all of our boxes of food have been carefully arranged and nothing is left in the ship’s hold, the rats begin nightly raids to our beds.” The Belgica was assailed from without and from within.
In a few moments, it became evident that Lecointe’s bombs had been perfectly calibrated. The ice was pulverized, but the hull was intact. For the first time since March 1898, the Belgica could set sail.
The men held their breath as the Belgica launched herself at full speed into the barricade. There was no going back: either the ship or the ice would prevail. The stem slammed into the mass and crushed it to bits under her weight. “With no further obstacle, [she] sails triumphantly into the grand clearing,” Lecointe reported.
“No body of men was ever happier than the officers and crew of the Belgica,” Cook wrote, “as the good ship thumped the edge of the ice which had held her a prisoner for nearly a year.”
Once her tanks were ballasted with seawater, she thrust her stem into isthmuses of ice, sliding up onto them and crushing them under her weight. This was what she had been built to do, and she threw herself against her captor with a vengeful élan.
Resourceful as ever, Cook devised an effective, if gruesome, method to cushion the hull. He hung penguin carcasses from the gunwales and dangled them in front of spots where the ice was striking the wood. The fleshy fenders helped blunt the impact of the floes until they were crushed to a pulp.
His name would make one more notable appearance in polar history. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, he teamed up with Lars Christensen, the Sandefjord shipbuilder who’d turned the Patria into the Belgica, to construct a new ship, the Polaris, on which he planned to lead polar-bear-hunting cruises for wealthy tourists. A three-masted barkentine clad in greenheart, she bore a sisterly resemblance to the Belgica. The Polaris was said to be among the strongest wooden vessels ever constructed. Yet in the end, de Gerlache had to back out of the partnership for financial reasons.
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Cook is an exemplar of a quintessentially American spirit, which lies on the razor’s edge between optimism and delusion, between audacity and deceit, imagination and flimflammery.
If neither Cook, nor Peary, nor Byrd reached the Pole—as is the overwhelming consensus—then the prize belongs to Amundsen.
The old man thought of his journeys with his friend and let himself drift, on a floe of memory, to the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea.
