Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica

Laurence A. Marschall

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica

by Tom Griffiths

Harvard University Press, 2008; $29.95

On the 17th of December, 2002, Tom Griffiths, an environmental historian at the Australian National University in Canberra, sailed south from Tasmania aboard a ship bringing supplies and a fresh crew to Antarctica's Casey Station. It was hardly the kind of heroic expedition that characterized trips to the frozen continent a century earlier, and judging from the journal entries in Slicing the Silence, not much out of the ordinary happened on the voyage. But as lovers of polar literature know full well, even an ordinary trip to Antarctica is extraordinary.

And this is an extraordinary book, as notable as that of Griffiths's antipodal fellow traveler Barry Lopez (whose 1986 best seller, Arctic Dreams, won a National Book Award). Griffiths turns otherwise humdrum shipboard jottings into starting points for inspired ruminations on the meaning of the Antarctic experience. Although he has never ventured into the interior, he seems to have read virtually everything published on the discovery, exploration, and exploitation of the southern continent, along with a host of unpublished diaries and station logs.

Best of all, he relates what he has learned in prose that is both thoughtful and luminous:

   Antarctica has an aura. I don't just mean its mystery, its magical
   otherworldliness, its implacable grandeur, and its capacity to
   haunt all who have visited it. I also mean that this land over the
   South Pole, which is covered by a single mineral, actually emanates
   ice, water and air well beyond its geographical boundaries
   .... Antarctica is like a giant, breathing organism clamped to the
   base of the globe. Every winter as the southern hemisphere tilts
   away from the sun, so much sea ice forms that the size of the white
   continent appears to double, only to shrink again in the summer,
   like a billowing creature rhythmically expanding and contracting.

You may recognize a few of the names and places on the book's pages: Ernest Shackleton, leading five men across 800 miles of storm-tossed sea in a small whaling boat after their ship was splintered by ice floes; Robert Falcon Scott and his party, beaten to the pole by Amundsen, freezing and starving to death in a canvas tent just eleven miles short of a major depot of food and fuel. But there are many other unfamiliar and astonishing stories. One essay, based on the journals of Robert Cushman Murphy, who went south to collect specimens for the AMNH in 1912, provides a window into the long-vanished world of southern whaling. Down among the floes and roaring winds on South Georgia island, Murphy discovered a surprising outpost of civilization--a mansion owned by a wealthy whaling captain, complete with a cook and butler, a billiard room, canaries, and a conservatory planted with flowers and palm trees.

Few of us will ever visit Antarctica, even though cruise ships now bring several tens of thousands of high-rolling tourists to its coasts each year. Readers, I am sure, will come away from this book agreed that fewer is better, because Griffiths makes it clear just how special this land is, and, for all its ruggedness, how fragile. Better to leave Antarctic travels to a select few scientists, adventurers, and support staff. And, from time to time--for those of us who stay at home--eloquent writers like Tom Griffiths.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning