An Irishwoman's Diary

COURAGE takes many forms, and no more so than when it is too cold even for viruses, and Jun Nishimura is cooking up three meals a day for his seven colleagues at an Antarctic research station.

And some colleagues they are, too. There’s the captain who is addicted to ramen noodles, the cocktail-loving doctor who laughs his head off at his patients’ ailments, the jilted research assistant who forms a relationship with the satellite telephone operator, and the communications officer who gorges on lumps of butter at midnight.

Nishimura's autobiographical account of life in the Dome Fuji Station kitchen near the South Pole in 1997 inspired the comedy, The Chef of South Polar,which was screened here recently as part of the Japanese Film Festival. It portrays how, deep in the southernmost regions at an average daily temperature of minus 54 degrees Celsius, Nishimura holds his team together with sumptuous meals of sushi and teriyaki chicken, Matsuzaka beef and spiny lobster.

In his narrative, Nishimura explains that the average person consumes about a tonne of food per year, it’s far too chilly even for penguins and seals, and the only other living things are the radishes and bean sprouts he grows in his “kitchen garden”, or fridge. Though his companions appear to take it all for granted, the rituals associated with good cooking and fine meals become a vital lifeline as the sun sets for the winter, each man hits a personal crisis, and all count down the days till their return home.

The chef remains forever stoic . . . almost. During a ridiculous scuffle between colleagues, his treasured daughter’s baby tooth vanishes down the station’s drilled ice core well. When he takes to his bunk to grieve, the seven disconsolate men fumbling for ingredients in his galley find it hard to cope.

And hasn’t food always been the unsung factor in exploration and adventure, amid all the talk of endurance and character? When Ernest Shackleton’s crew was running out of supplies on Elephant Island in 1916 during their failed Antarctic crossing, the men would while away the nights on empty stomachs reading a recipe from a cookbook they had salvaged from their ice-bound ship.

“This would be discussed very seriously,” Shackleton wrote, “and alterations and improvements suggested, and then they would turn into their [sleeping] bags to dream of wonderful meals they could never reach.” Rorke Bryan hasn’t written a treatise on culinary skills in sub-zero climes, but he has gone one better than that. Sailors, navigators, dog drivers and cooks were all essential members of such expeditions – but without ships to carry them, they’d never have got close in the first place.

It was on a “gloomy November day in 1948” that Bryan says he became “hooked”, through “clouds of cigarette smoke” in Dublin’s Metropole cinema, as he watched John Mills, alias Capt Scott, “struggle across the frozen wastes of Ealing Studios to die in a blizzard 18 kilometres from his next food depot”. The result is a 536-page encyclopaedia of ships of the Antarctic, dating back to the 15th-century fleets of the Ming emperors of China.

It is also a comprehensive history of the Antarctic – a southern continent speculated about by an Irish priest Virgil who was excommunicated for his dangerous thoughts by Pope Zacharias in 741 AD; and a land mass first sighted by an Irishman serving with the British Navy, Edward Bransfield, in 1820.

Nor does his book focus only on the English-speaking celebrities – Shackleton and Scott – but records the role of other pioneers, like Belgian naval officer Adrien de Gerlache in 1898, who became the first team leader to experience an Antarctic winter, and accepted a young Norwegian named Roald Amundsen on his crew.

Bryan weaves many intricate tales through the fabric of his analysis, explaining why some ship designs lasted longer than others – such as the Portuguese caravel. He reminds us of the challenges of navigation before satellite technology, and how the Viking word “hafvilla” described the state of being lost at sea for several days.

His account of the Antarctic circumnavigation by Capt John Biscoe in 1831-32 has to be one of the most extraordinary. Biscoe's brig Tulawas just 74ft (22m), and it survived a five-day hurricane and scurvy among the crew. Only the captain and a cabin boy could stand up when they reached Van Diemen's Land or Tasmania.

The son of a merchant mariner, Bryan has travelled extensively, working on environmental conservation, forestry and development at the universities of Alberta and Toronto in Canada, and spending time with the British Antarctic Survey. It is only half a century since the Antarctic Treaty came into effect, establishing such research stations as national “footprints” on a shared continent.

And it’s only a century since Gerlache’s crewman, Roald Amundsen, beat Scott in the race to the South Pole. You’ll hear a lot about it between now and December 14th – though it was March 7th, 1912,when it hit the news on Amundsen’s arrival in Hobart, Tasmania.

Ordeal by Ice: Ships of the Antarcticby Rorke Bryan is published by The Collins Press