Book Report: End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica

3. Peter Matthiessen, End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica (2003) (2/25/2020)

In this book, Matthiessen, author of so many wonderful books, including The Snow Leopard, The Wind Birds, The Birds of Heaven, and The Tree Where Man Was Born, details two voyages he took to Antarctica: first, in 1988, to the Antarctic Peninsula, via South Georgia Island, and three years later to the Ross Sea on the opposite side of the continent. As always, he has marvelous descriptions of landscapes and of wildlife, explanations of geology, animal life cycles, and the various journeys of exploration to discover and then navigate the great white southern planet. At the end of the first part (of four) he lists the three species that they did not succeed in spotting on the Peninsula trip: emperor penguins, Southern Ocean orcas, and Ross seals. At the end of part three, in which they travel, via icebreaker, as far as Cape Crozier, before turning back toward Tasmania, he has spotted all three. That search is, in a certain sense, the “bones” of the book, if you will. Without those elusive creatures, I suppose, it would have been more nearly a simple travelogue, with occasional politics, conservation, science (the ozone hole, for example), and natural history thrown in.
  Some of my favorite passages, however, reflect Matthiessen’s personal passions: the human impact on this planet and understanding what moves him (or any of us) to go where we go, seek what we seek, in the world. Here are a couple of examples:

Watching for hours from bow and bridge, I am awed by these creatures and their adaptations and migrations, as I also am—please forgive these digressions—by icebergs, whales, the sea and ships, circumpolar currents, geologic time, the origins and evolutionary histories of life-forms, the quirks of birds, birders, and explorers, antifreeze in fish blood, the blue in ice, human folly, the ozone hole, and the earthly balances upset by global warming—in short, the mysteries of the natural world in their endless variations, the myriad petals of creation that open and fall away in every moment.
  Therefore I seek to understand phenomena that might help our self-destroying species to appreciate the shimmering web of biodiversity in the Earth process—the common miracles, fleeting as ocean birds, which present themselves endlessly to all our senses, to be tasted, experienced, and fiercely defended for our innocent inheritors against the rape and dreadful; wasting of this beautiful and fragile biosphere and its resources. In the forgetting that we, too, are animals, a part of nature, as dependent on its health and balance as any other mammal, we foolishly permit the unrestrained destruction of our Earth habitat that promises to leave mankind as desolate and bereft of hope as a turtle stripped live from its shell.

And this, speaking to “the longing for the ice”:

Just why, only three years after our first trip, with much work undone at home, I wished to make a far longer voyage to the ice was an intricate question. “To see the emperor penguin” was not good enough. I might mutter uncomfortably that Antarctica is monumental, an astonishment. Perhaps (if pressed) I might declare that its excrutiating purity and vast ringing silence ring with creation, ancient and yet new and fresh beyond imagining. More than any region left on Earth, I plead, Antarctica is immaculate, inviolable, a white fastness of pristine air and ice and virgin glacier at the farthest end of Earth, where frigid seas abound in marine creatures in a diversity still marvelously intact—all true, all true. Yet there is something else. [He goes on to quote various explorers: a sense of a “giant force which is visibly, before his eyes, carving out the world” (Cherry-Garard), of a “worthwhile life” (geologist Griffith Taylor), of “pierc(ing) the outside veneer of things, . . . see(ing) God in his splendour, hear(ing) the text that nature renders . . . reach(ing) the naked soul of man (Ernest Shackleton).]
  “The ancient and indifferent ice gives up its secrets slowly,” someone else has said. At its glacial pace, the ice eventually relinquishes its mystery, whatever that might be. It clearly remained beyond articulation even by men who knew the ice firsthand under hard conditions.
  Thus I struggle to find words for such wordless feeling: What draws me eludes me to the same degree, and seeking to understand rather than simply apprehend it may be just the problem.

Later in the book he speaks to an overwhelming desire to simplify, not his life, but his “self”:

In the sea rhythm and the wind on deck, I fill my lungs with ocean emptiness and the pure wind circling the Earth; in hard weather, driven below, I kneel on the spare bunk and peer out of my window at the waves, awaiting the passage of light-boned ocean birds in their fragility and their taut strength, astonished anew by and to the degree that I am able to let go of mind and body and escape all boundaries, I soar with them in the unity of being.

It was interesting, and meaningful, to read this book aboard the 26-meter Hans Hansson while sailing among the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula, reveling in that stark and beautiful and fragile landscape. This was one of the books in the shipboard library. A fitting inclusion.