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

by Julian Sancton

The Belgian Antarctic Expedition was sold as a scientific mission, but at its core it was a romantic endeavor. De Gerlache conceived the journey because the blank space at the bottom of the map drew him in like a vacuum. Up until then, that void, which the Belgica’s scientists hoped to fill with cold, hard facts, had been filled with fiction. The men’s conceptions of the unknown Antarctic were necessarily formed by literature, just as Jules Verne’s fantasies had been inspired by science.

However metaphorical, these stories inevitably seeped into the minds of the Belgica’s men. Their own diaries and accounts of the expedition, even those of the scientists, are littered with novelistic flourishes that owe a debt to—and even directly reference—the likes of Poe and Verne. The journals would grow only more gothic in tone as the events they described began to fit the archetype of the polar horror story.

There was too much work to do for the men to wallow long in resentment and anguish. In the rapidly diminishing daylight hours of March and April, the crew went about preparing the Belgica for winter. The sails were furled and stored away, the propeller was lifted out of the water to protect it from the pressures of the ice, and the fires of the engine were allowed to die down. Among the most urgent tasks was to build a massive snowbank around the ship to insulate her against the cold. This encasement, sloping up to the gunwales, kept the interior of the Belgica at a comfortable 50 degrees despite a precipitous drop in the mercury outside. In mid-March, the thermometer indicated an exterior temperature of −5 degrees. Ice formed around the ropes in the rigging, lending it the look of a silver spiderweb. At this latitude, by Lecointe’s calculations, the sun would set for good by mid-May and night would last almost three months. Temperatures were sure to drop further in the coming weeks, though nobody knew by how much, since no man had ever lived through winter this far south. All the expedition could do was prepare for the worst.

As the days stretched on, the view from Cook’s soot-blackened porthole hardly changed. The same distant icebergs remained more or less in the same positions relative to the ship, as stable and reliable as the church steeples of neighboring towns. Yet this reliability was an illusion. The whole pack was moving erratically at the rate of several miles a day. The Belgica was no longer sailing, but she was still roaming the ocean on a course beyond her control. “There has been no fixed point to indicate our drift, and we cannot see that we pass through the water because the entire horizon, the countless fields and mountains of ice, slide with us at the same rate of speed,” Cook wrote. The doctor began to worry that the men’s minds would likewise come untethered and drift into fear and insanity.

“How that great golden ball of cold fire incites the spirit to expressions of joy and gratitude!” he wrote. “The sun is, indeed, the father of everything terrestrial. We have suddenly found a tonic in the air, an inspiration in the scenic splendours of the sea of ice, and a cheerfulness in each other’s companionship which makes the death-dealing depression of the night a thing of the past.”

Several miles into their trek back to the ship, the travelers heard the sound of frolicking whales. Ordinarily these were enchanting noises. But now, coming through the fog from every direction, they indicated that the men’s fears had come true: the pack had cracked up behind them. They were surrounded by bands of open water, cut off from the large floe that held the ship. The ice on which they walked had fractured into loosely interlocking pans. The three men tried at first to jump from one to the next, hoping in this way to reach solid ice. But as evening fell, the wind changed direction and floes spread out across the water. The sledging party was suddenly cast adrift. All around them, pans hurtled and ground chaotically into one another, getting smaller with every collision. By nighttime, the men managed to reach a square floe no wider than twenty meters and found a reasonably solid area on which to pitch their tent. They had no choice but to spend the night on an island of ice. “I cannot imagine a position in the polar pack more hopeless,” wrote Cook.

Afraid that the ice would break up beneath them overnight and that they would not awake until they fell into the water, Lecointe, Cook, and Amundsen took turns keeping watch. Not that any of them got much sleep. They were kept up by the screeching wind; the sound of ice bumping, cracking, and crumbling; and a symphony of grunts, barks, and exhalations. “Our floe was little by little reduced in size until we could hear the seals in the water as plainly as if they were under the tent,” wrote Cook.

Torn between hope and despair, the castaways returned to their tent and made a hearty meal out of their dwindling provisions. They would have to endure at least another night on their island. One slight comfort was that the temperature had dropped again. The ice would not break so easily, and slushy new ice forming on the water would cushion the floe against knocks and pressures. Nevertheless, the three men each slept with a knife at the ready in case the ice split beneath them and they needed to cut their way out of the tent while holding their breath in the pitch-black water.

The deckhand recovered his speech and hearing within a week, but not his reason. Among the first things he said when he found his voice was that he was going to murder his superior, chief engineer Henri Somers, as soon as he had the chance. Cook’s photographs of the twenty-one-year-old, light-haired Van Mirlo around this time suggest madness. In one portrait, the sailor’s eyes are almost entirely white. His pupils are thrust all the way to the side, fixed on something just off camera that appears to frighten him. His downy lip begins to curl into a smile. Van Mirlo’s insanity struck his shipmates at their core. It was one thing to be depressed, to suffer from despair, or even to be worn down by physical maladies like Danco. But Van Mirlo’s unraveling escalated the sense of terror that had been simmering on board for months. He was simultaneously an augury of the worst that the men feared for themselves and a vector of fear. If he said he would murder Somers, what was to stop him from changing his mind and killing someone else? Now the expeditioners had to worry not only about “the elements conjured against us,” wrote Lecointe, but also “this man who was irresponsible for his actions.” The sailor’s condition was a particularly extreme manifestation of the generalized panic that most were barely managing to keep contained.

Amundsen cultivated the image of a modern Viking and followed a code of honor that often conflicted with the nuances and compromises of life at lower latitudes. Just as he remained fiercely loyal to his closest friends—a small group that now included Cook—he rarely forgot a slight. He would never forgive de Gerlache. His confrontation of the commandant, whom he had once so admired, was practically Oedipal in nature. It marked the end of his polar apprenticeship and his coming-of-age as a leader in his own right.