Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night

by Julian Sancton

Michotte cited his skill at fencing among his qualifications for Antarctic exploration. De Gerlache hired him, too.

De Gerlache surely hoped his layover in Ostend would go unnoticed, but he picked the worst spot to drop anchor—right next to King Leopold’s yacht, the Clémentine, on which the king’s presence was soon expected. The inevitable encounter ended in the most embarrassing possible fashion when Leopold emerged to address the Belgica’s crew and pretended not to recognize the ship.

“Strangely enough the thing in Sir John’s narrative that appealed to me most strongly was the sufferings he and his men endured,” Amundsen wrote. “A strange ambition burned within me to endure those same sufferings.”

He set daily challenges for himself, such as summiting the nearest snowcapped peak, walking across a vertiginous ridge no wider than a horse’s back, or swimming across frigid mountain streams. The more exhausting the climb, the more miserable the elements, the more Amundsen enjoyed himself. He liked to imagine how he might appear to someone watching his exploits from afar, comparing himself to “a slinking panther” or, in one instance, to Ibsen’s picaresque hero Peer Gynt. He would return to the Belgica cold, wet, tired, sore, muddied, lacerated, and happier than he’d ever been.

To the seasoned polar explorer, the sky could be as informative as it was to the astronomer, but not for the same reasons. In fact, it helped if it was overcast. It then became a canvas on which an image of the sea was projected by reflection, like an inverted map. In addition to iceblinks, dark blots called “water skies” indicated the presence of open water beneath.

The vision was known as a Fata Morgana, caused when a layer of uniformly cold air rests beneath a warmer layer, bending and distorting the light from distant objects.

While de Gerlache knew that trapping his men in the ice could lead to terrible suffering, he also had to have known that this suffering could be a down payment on future returns, financial and otherwise.

“We are no longer navigators,” wrote de Gerlache, “but a small colony of prisoners serving their sentence.”

causing this and then playing the victim card is CRAZY, I hate this guy, bro

These phenomena are, in fact, driven by solar wind, a flow of charged particles ejected violently from the sun. This fast-moving plasma, especially intense during periods of heightened solar activity, travels through space until it slams into the earth’s magnetosphere, whereupon it follows the lines of the planet’s magnetic field down to the poles. When the particles collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the earth’s upper atmosphere, the agitated atoms emit radiation that we perceive as streamers of red, green, violet, or white light.

Everything is restful and motionless, and covered with the white silence of death.”

With a thick haze masking the horizon on the expected morning, it didn’t seem as if the sun would show up for its own funeral.

All continued to stare at Danco for a moment, as if death wouldn’t come until they looked away.

“Yes, I have peace, but only around me, because in my head there is always uncertainty and unrest. I have no confidence in the future.”

Cook’s intervention is the first known instance of light therapy, regularly used today to treat seasonal affective disorder and other conditions.

It snowed inside the tent as well: the condensation from the sleepers’ breath froze against the walls and floated back down in flakes.

He forgot how tired he was, forgot the lancing pain at his temples. He had dreamed of a glorious return for almost as long as he had dreamed of the Antarctic and was now mute with emotion.

“There is a relation between the tongue and the harpoon. Both can inflict painful wounds. The cut of the lance heals. The cut of the tongue rots.”

Hell is a cold place, but the sunshine will be better because of the darkness there when you come out.”

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.

Gerlache established a standard of global cooperation that persists in Antarctica to this day, unlike in the oil-rich and increasingly contested Arctic.

Thanks to de Gerlache, and to his son Gaston, who led his own Antarctic mission in 1957–58, Belgium is a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which forbids all military activity on the continent. A subsequent accord, the Madrid Protocol of 1991, protects Antarctica’s animals and natural resources against all forms of exploitation. Antarctica’s example, in turn, prefigured such grand scientific endeavors as the International Space Station, where astronauts from rival nations collaborate peacefully, irrespective of terrestrial squabbles.

Cook’s observations, his warnings, his ad hoc remedies and recommendations, have directly influenced NASA operating procedures.