Our daily tasks included painting the Chilean hut (which was our home for what we thought would be a couple of days) and counting penguins. A fascinating but also dull task. In the first two days we went from approx 1,000 to 9,000, they were coming in thick and fast.
These few days gave me the time to reflect and catch up on my reading. The book I was reading whilst here was “And Quiet Flows the Don” by Mikhail Sholokhov (but more on that later). Radio contact with base was sporadic so we continued to paint and count penguins. The cold was intense and something I will never forget. We eventually made contact with base and decided to return to base the following morning (this was day 4).
Disaster! Overnight the sea ice had formed between the island and base. It was unstable and we couldn’t walk across, the boat would not be able to get through.
Worst of all we ran out of cigarettes (bearing in mind this was the 60’s and everyone smoked then). Desperation kicked in and I tried making some out of old cigarette stumps, pipe tobacco and toilet paper…rotten!
Day 10 – we had officially run out of tobacco and all three of us were despondent. The 1st of November came and went. We finally made contact with base again. The lads came up with a plan to rescue us. Not rescue from the hut as this would have been impossible but from the cigarette situation!
The lads on Base came up with the idea to construct a mini rucksack, which they would put on the back of a migrating penguin heading in our direction. They filled it with supplies (tobacco and cigarettes) and sent it in our direction. Two days later we got a message that Bob Davidson and Bill Taylor were on the way to rescue us. The ice had finally cracked.
By this time we hadn’t seen the penguin despite keeping a lookout day and night. Several days later I was back on Avian Island and, lo and behold, what should we spot in the distance…a penguin with a tiny rucksack on its back! Happy days for us and the penguin as we relieved it of its cargo.
Whilst in Antarctica I
borrowed several books off Bill Taylor who was an avid reader. His Russian
novels, many of which are still classics today sparked a passion for Russian
literature which continued for the rest of my life and passed onto my son.
Years later this interest for Russia sent me on a trip with my good friends Ian
Sykes and Tony Bushell and my now wife Patricia. We travelled to Russia during
the height of communism and I got to see first hand the places I had read about
all those years earlier in the books I read in Antarctica.
Barrie