November 28 marks the 45th anniversary of the Erebus disaster. Matt Vance talks about journeys into the icy wasteland, including a journey with relatives of those who died.
The first thing you notice upon arriving in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica is the mountain. It is as ubiquitous as a portrait with eyes following you around the room. Even if you’re buried in your sleeping bag during a snowstorm, you know it’s there, like a magnet for your inner magnet. Maybe
is because it is volcanic and constantly rumbles with a plume of wispy smoke, or perhaps because it is the tallest, darkest thing in a landscape dominated by white and the horizontal.
The mountain is called Erebus and is supported by Terror, its smaller, sleeping twin to the west. Erebus is a cone-shaped volcanic mountain with gently sloping flanks. At first glance it looks like you could wander there on an afternoon walk. In reality it is a five-day climb over treacherous gorges and icefalls. It’s a mountain of tricks, one minute Doctor Jekyll, the next Mr. Hyde.
In 1841, James Clark Ross named these two mountains after expedition ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror (the Ross expedition of 1839 – 1843, led by Ross, discovered the ice shelf and explored the sea that now bears his name). In Greek mythology, Erebus was one of the primordial gods born from the void of Chaos. Erebus personified darkness and was also said to be a transition zone between Earth and Hades. It was an odd thing to name a ship after, and the darkness of the name seems to have spread to the mountain.
In fact, HMS Erebus met a terrible end. Equipped with small steam engines, it and HMS Terror were used during John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to cross the last unnavigated section of the Arctic’s famous Northwest Passage. The ships became stuck in the ice off the coast of King William Island, forcing the expedition to attempt a self-rescue on foot. While they survived for months, perhaps years, the crew endured a miserable end of starvation, madness, and suspected cannibalism.
The story of the expedition’s disappearance became one of the world’s greatest mysteries. Large sums of money and resources were poured into discovering the fate of the men, and it was not until 2014 that the wreck of the Erebus was discovered at the bottom of the Queen Maud Gulf by a Canadian research vessel using hi-tech sonar.
Guiding lights
There must have been something about this Hades affair that infected the common perception of the mountain at Scott Base in New Zealand. Around the comfortable corridors of the base, the field guides form a privileged subculture. Unlike chefs and mechanics, they can go anywhere. They constantly travel with science teams to places that few ever see. Most of them are mountain guides in their other lives, but in Antarctica they have traded vertical challenges for horizontal ones. Strangely, their enthusiasm seems to evaporate when they get the chance to go vertical and guide researchers to Mount Erebus. When I ask them about it, most of them just shrug their shoulders and stare intently at their expensive cross trainers.
“It’s a terrible mountain,” says Stu, our guide. It’s as close to an admission as I’ve come. Stu will be our field guide for an easy ascent of Mt Erebus. We’ll fly by helicopter to just below the summit, where we’ll drop some supplies for a group studying the life forms around the fumaroles, or volcanic springs, along the mountain’s edge.
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I sit next to Rob, a pilot who is one of the best in his field and has the attitude of a hard-bitten Antarctic veteran. The Bell 212 helicopter works its way up the mountain and tacks like a yacht to gain altitude.
‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ in Antarctica, August 1841, oil on canvas, by John Wilson Carmichael, 1847. Artwork / Getty Images
At the top, the air is thin and approaching the limit of where a helicopter can go. Before us the mountain lies like a wall, with large crevasses breaking up the smooth snow surface. We fly over some camps that look like dog poop on a white carpet, and the remains of a crashed helicopter. “I’ve been there since the sixties,” Stu calls into the intercom.
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Rob, never one for small talk, becomes even more focused as he searches for a suitable platform on which to land the helicopter. We land in a cloud of snow dust, and while the engine is running it still seems tense. “Okay, if I say we have to go, you just move…understood?” he says. It is a command that is as clear as it is direct. The weather and visibility here can change by the minute, and the thought of having to camp for a week and live on survival rations doesn’t appeal to any of us.
The thin air at the top of Erebus has an immediate effect. Our breathing is long and panting because we haven’t had time to acclimatize to the altitude. Stu keeps contacting me: “There’s one that falls over every now and then when we make this trip,” he says. “How are you feeling?” I nod and give a thumbs up, but I’m high as a kite, light-headed and drunk on the power of the mountain masquerading as altitude sickness. I walk around, breathe, help unload some stuff and greet the scientists who have been sentenced to camp here for a month. We’re only there for a short time and I don’t need Rob’s encouragement to ‘move my butt’ when it’s time to leave. I have a strong desire to get off this mountain.
From the Ross Ice Shelf, the mountain never seems to shrink; it’s always there and looks like a cartoon of a mountain. Author Robert Macfarlane wrote: ‘Without a doubt, it is these innocent-looking cone-shaped mountains that have killed the most people in human history.’ This mountain is no different.
The north side hides a kilometre-long scar containing the wreckage of Air New Zealand’s flight TE901, which plowed into Mount Erebus on November 28, 1979 during a sightseeing trip from Auckland to McMurdo Sound. In this one violent moment, more Kiwis died in the mountains. Antarctica than any other nationality. The scar on the mountain also cut through a generation of New Zealanders who now associate the name with a personal brand of horror. In a landscape where the cold has destroyed all sense of smell, it has infused this mountain with tapu strong enough to taste.
After the crash, the predecessors of these young field guides were sent out to search for survivors and, with the help of the New Zealand Police, carry out the gruesome task of recovering the bodies from the mountain. This is why I questioned the cross country trainers and maybe I also felt uncomfortable on the mountain.
The Erebus disaster is New Zealand’s version of the ‘Scott Expedition’, the pioneering adventure that ended in the deaths of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four of his best men during their failed attempt to become the first to reach the Geographic South Pole in 1912. reaches. a name that New Zealanders of a certain generation will never forget. It has become part of a cultural landscape of fear.
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Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole Expedition in January 1911. The explorers face Mount Erebus on Ross Island. Photo/Getty Images
Anniversary flight
A few years after my first trip to Mount Erebus, I was part of the communications team involved in a series of events commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster. A dinner at a luxury hotel in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square for relatives of those killed on flight TE901 was the first part of a logistical effort that saw them flown to McMurdo Sound for a short ceremony on the ice.
These were the daughters, sons and spouses of the 257 people who boarded a plane one spring morning and never returned. At my table sat a grandson who had no memory of his grandfather, a woman whose husband had died, and a daughter whose mother had also died. The conversation was full of the pleasantries of strangers meeting. We were fed a large meal and listened intently as an Air New Zealand representative gave a long speech, doing his best to be sincere without apologizing for the disaster.
It was an unusual meeting; some of them were beyond the tragedy; others had held on to their grief.
The older woman at my table, whose husband had died, had fed her grief until it had taken over her entire behavior. Instead of sadness, she was overwhelmed by anger. Like a bomb going off, the Erebus disaster had sent shockwaves through the generations to come.
I was the only person at the table who had been to Antarctica, so I was inundated with questions about our upcoming trip. The older widow seemed receptive to the questions raised by the others. She nodded at my description of the effects of 24-hour daylight and seemed interested in the strange behavior of sea ice.
When someone asked me if I had ever been to Mount Erebus, I nodded and started describing my helicopter trip with Rob. My story came to nothing when I noticed the widow staring at me with a look that came from the dark area between Earth and Hades.
The shadow of the mountain had reached far north.
Matt Vance’s latest book Domestic is out now.
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