The beautiful south: Antarctica
Each day a fresh newsletter is posted on to the walls of the polar research ship Akademik Ioffe. On rougher sea passages the notes are ornamented with sick bags tucked into the corners, but on the first day of our voyage to the Antarctic there is a Steinbeck quote instead. "A journey is a person itself," it reads. "No two are alike… We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."
This trip is a strange one. Everyone who has gathered here in Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of Argentina, has an agenda – needs, desires, something they hope the ice will show them. Most passengers have paid richly for the privilege: tickets start at $10,300 and end somewhere in the upper atmosphere. There are several twitchers, dangling lenses from their necks like electronic fertility symbols. There's a couple of bucket-list completionists knocking off the last of their seven continents. Some are after the full box-set of penguins, and some are just seeking a place where the world can't reach them. One couple walked into the travel agent's planning a trip to Africa and walked out with a ticket to the end of the world. The rest have reason to be here – scientists hitching a ride, polar experts, and those in search of Frank Wild.
A century ago, on 14 December 1911, Roald Amundsen raised the Norwegian flag at the South Pole. Because he's foreign and because he succeeded, it won't be his achievement that the British mark; it will be Scott's heroic failure, and Shackleton's great escape.
When the Weddell Sea ice crushed Ernest Shackleton's expedition vessel, the Endurance, during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-16, his men took to the lifeboats and rowed their way to Elephant Island. There Shackleton left his second-in-command, Frank Wild, in charge of the main group while he and five men set off in the James Caird to find help 800 miles away in South Georgia. They succeeded; Shackleton, Wild and the rest finally returned to Britain ragged, malnourished, but alive and sane.
An ancient iceberg in Paradise Bay. Photograph: Bella Bathurst for the Observer
Back among the mapped territories, however, Shackleton lost his way. In photographs his face is young but his eyes are lightless. Five years later he contacted Wild – by then living and farming in South Africa – and asked if he'd like to act again as his second-in-command. The two balanced each other so well they almost became a single entity. "It is hardly necessary to write about him," Shackleton wrote of Wild in his book South. "He is my second self. I love him. He has been a tower of strength to me."
