Madhouse At The End Of The Earth: The Belgica's Journey Into The Dark Antarctic Night Quotes
"Belgium, little Belgium, a country that had declared its independence from Holland sixty-seven years earlier and was thus younger than many of its citizens, was staking a claim to the next frontier of human exploration."
"My state of mind," he wrote, "was that of a man who has just reached his goal."
"The starting point felt to him like the finish line."
"As soon as he came home he became nostalgic," Adrien’s sister, Louise, recalled. "Out of duty and obedience he pursued his engineering studies in good conscience; soon his health deteriorated seriously, he became terribly melancholy, his eyes took on that look particular to sailors and voyagers, that veiled and unfathomable gaze which, even when it points straight into your eyes, seems to contemplate infinite expanses much farther away."
To go down in history—and prove to his father that his dreams of nautical glory were not misplaced—de Gerlache would need to come home with a record, a "first" of some kind.
"Cook had a remarkable ability to connect with his patients, to gain their trust, even their love, and perhaps this skill allowed him to cover for the fact that these days he was not fully present."
"Cook was drawn to the poles as if by magnetism."
"Inspired by Franklin and Nansen, Amundsen resolved from a young age to become a polar explorer, an unwavering ambition that bordered on obsession."
"Amundsen subjected himself to an intense physical and mental training program at the expense of everything else in his life, including schoolwork and romantic entanglements."
"He slept with his bedroom window open throughout the winter to inure his body to the cold and went on frequent excursions in the mountains outside Kristiania."
"In the middle of the night I woke up. My muscles felt cramped and I made the instinctive move to change my position. I could not move an inch. I was practically frozen inside a solid block of ice!"
"He was back in Sandefjord on June 18, 1897, when he joined the Belgica. The timing was fortuitous: the next day, Fridtjof Nansen visited the ship ahead of her departure for Antwerp."
"Amundsen’s route to Antarctica had been methodical, charted out to the finest detail."
"As boys, de Gerlache and his men would have thrilled to Verne’s books."
"The Belgian Antarctic Expedition was sold as a scientific mission, but at its core it was a romantic endeavor."
"The ship rounded Cape Virgenes and sailed on into the Strait of Magellan, which winds through Tierra del Fuego, connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific."
"Lecointe solemnly ordered Arctowski to retrieve the expedition’s largest Belgian flag, the one they had flown so proudly when entering the ports of Rio and Montevideo."
"With every moment, Wiencke fell farther behind the ship."
"As he watched the black, yellow, and red flag crawl up the flagpole, de Gerlache pictured the headlines back home."
"The chinstrap penguin is a strict individualist, constantly quarreling to defend its property."
"The decent and honest gentoo is a shrewd communist, having nothing to defend against its fellow citizens, having shared the land."
"The obligation required him to kill animals with sickening regularity, a necessary desecration of this white paradise in the name of knowledge."
"The sound of the sea gradually freezing around the ship was alarming to several of the men on board, particularly the scientists."
"We are no longer navigators, but a small colony of prisoners serving their sentence."
"The rare occasions on which Lecointe was able to glimpse the stars and fix the ship’s position were greeted with joy."
"The commandant did not relish suffering for its own sake the way Amundsen did, had not familiarized himself with its clarifying grip."
"The ship is caught between several large ‘pans’ that grip it and make all progress impossible."
"Cook, meanwhile, became concerned about the pernicious physical and mental effects of inactivity."
"The longer they traveled, the more confident their strides became. They had almost forgotten they weren’t walking on land."
"To be shipwrecked in the Antarctic was an altogether more daunting proposition."
"These dark lights are Eskimo lights, indicating the movement of the people who have passed beyond the earth."
"The crew’s quarters were more comfortable than when the expedition had left Antwerp, now that there were fewer sailors sleeping in the bunks along the walls of the snug, V-shaped forecastle."
"The men were awakening to the fact that a decision had been made, one that had not been part of the expedition’s original plan, and which filled them with trepidation."
"The wind had painted wavelike undulations in the snow, as it does in fine desert sands."
"The men’s only hope was that there might still be a chance to escape."
"The Belgica’s winter would be far more perilous."
"I shoot her behind the ear with a hollow-point bullet, which exits above the eye. The animal expires on the spot, but jets of blood as thick as a thumb spurt out of both orifices without cease for 5 minutes."
"In the absence of easily accessible natural resources to exploit, stories were what polar explorers extracted from these barren icescapes."
"The practical and calm way this man works is interesting to see."
"At first my teeth chattered and every muscle of my body quivered, but in a few minutes this passed off and there came a reaction similar to that after a cold bath."
"Never mind that traveling by kayak from Victoria Land to Australia was assured suicide, or that camping on an iceberg was at best ill-advised."
"I will not allow my plan to spend the winter on an iceberg to be influenced by this."
"We did not get on well together so I shall not deny that I am pleased about this."
"If suffering was tantamount to accomplishment, then pleasure was a form of complacency."
"Our first question in the morning is ‘how is the wind?’"
"This polar underpart of the world is decidedly unfit for human life."
"Icebergs and hummocks flaunt their silver crests and project behind them diaphanous shadows."
"You feel that there is something else besides the earth."
"The stomach demands things with a natural fiber, or some tough, gritty substance."
"The truth is, that we are at this moment as tired of each other’s company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night."
"We could feel that this pale dawn was powerless to give birth to the day."
"Death is creeping up to me from my feet. See my ankles. It’s all over."
"I will sit on the stove for a month and eat penguins for the rest of my polar life if that will do me good."
"Word of Lecointe’s miraculous recovery spread throughout the ship, and soon almost everyone was coming to Cook, seeking treatment for real or imaginary troubles."
"The doctor turned his shipmates’ eyes away from the dark chasm of anguish into which they stared throughout the night and toward the light at the horizon."
"Our eyes were dazzled by this radiant vision. One must be deprived of the sun to know how beneficial it is for the body and the soul."
"The sun is, indeed, the father of everything terrestrial. We have suddenly found a tonic in the air, an inspiration in the scenic splendors of the sea of ice."
"The effort was especially draining on de Gerlache, who by then was in far worse shape than the others, and yet the commandant persevered."
"The notion that Melaerts would ever come to command the ship instead of Amundsen certainly gave the commandant a start."
"If he said he would murder Somers, what was to stop him from changing his mind and killing someone else?"
"The men killed on a daily basis, spattering blood across the white pack."
"It was time for the men to leave, or risk not finding their way back."
"Tollefsen’s paranoid behavior had begun to trouble his shipmates earlier that month."
"We in return did some speech-making, and a little story-telling too."
"The entire ice was a mass of quivering blue."
"The only wish anyone had for the New Year was the breakup of the floe."
"I think it highly unlikely that we will get out of here the same way as we came in here."
"For three days we have worked, not like men, but like dogs in chase of game."
"Even doing something pointless, he insisted, was less harmful than doing nothing at all."
"Had we done this in December, the result might have been more satisfactory, but now it is too late."
"Breaking out of the ice no longer seemed like a ridiculous proposition."
"We had travelled on skis and other snowshoes so long, and had been tossed about on the sea so much, that we had forgotten how to walk normally."
"The sensation left some of the crew giddy."
"We spread our legs, dragged our feet, braced and balanced our bodies with every step, and altogether our gait was ridiculous."
"No body of men was ever happier than the officers and crew of the Belgica, as the good ship thumped the edge of the ice which had held her a prisoner for nearly a year."
"The ship is shaken hard, and trembles like a leaf."
"Under a black sky so low that the waves could seemingly spray it with foam—they were a diffuse regiment of mighty pyramids of fluid iron colors with dribbling streams of foam."
"These documents would have presented a certain interest, For my part, I declare that I had nothing to do with this act and blame those who directly or indirectly contributed to it."
"Goodbye to the pack with its attendant suffering and grief, but which has given us, amid the bitter joy of discovery, a feeling of pride that never again we shall experience!"
"But now that all of our boxes of food have been carefully arranged and nothing is left in the ship’s hold, the rats begin nightly raids to our beds."
"Something infinitely happy, yet laced with sadness, with regret, stirred in the bottom of our hearts."
"It was only when they got to their hotel rooms that the men understood why the women on the streets had avoided their gaze or fled outright."
"The ship’s late escape from the pack, as well as the poor health of the men, ruled out extending the mission for a third year."
"What a sight! We’ve grown used to it, but it’s still terrible. Surrounded by heaps of trash and shit, which form puddles under the influence of the strong sun."
"He ordered Somers to throw the engine in reverse. The maneuver could wreck the engine, de Gerlache thought, but if it worked, it might buy the ship just enough space to make a final dash."