Michael Warr (1)

In South of Sixty: Life on an Antarctic Base (Prince George, British Columbia: Antarctic Memories Publishing, 2005), Michael Warr provides us with a vivid account of his experiences as a member of the British Antarctic Survey in the 1960s. He is telling the story some 40 years later, so he has the benefit of later life lessons and the presumed maturity of settled middle age- but he is able to write about that time of his life as he saw it then- with a sense of adventure and wonder and the combined cockiness and insecurity of callow youth. He was employed on a scientific mission, but he and his fellow explorer/scientists were young men who were supplied with a large quantity of alcohol and who thought and talked about sex a lot, and so there are parts of South of Sixty which read more like something written by a young Hunter S. Thompson than the typical National Geographic-style article on the Antarctic.

Warr seems to have inherited his adventurous spirit from his father, who was a partner/owner in a camping/hiking equipment company that he helped start up in England in the early 1950s. Not content just to sell gear for outdoors adventure, his dad took up the hobby of mountaineering, first in the Alps and then in the mountains of South Asia. He died on a climb in the Karakoram Range in Pakistan in 1958. Young Warr volunteered for the British Antarctic Survey in the autumn of 1963, when he was 20, and was enlisted as a member of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, which had jurisdiction over the British bases in the Antarctic Peninsula. He and his fellow members of the service were known as "Fids". He describes his voyage to the far South aboard the Shackleton, including his part in the Crossing of the Equator ceremony and his escapades in Montevideo and Buenos Aires when the ship made a port call for repairs, resupply and R and R.

Warr was assigned as a meteorologist and he gives his readers an evocative picture of the changing weather and its patterns as he journeyed from the tropics through the southern temperate zone and into the sub-Antarctic seas. His description is more than a recitation of dry statistics, he conveys the mood that the weather promoted in the men who had to deal with it. He also has a fine eye for the animal life of the region, telling us about the penguins and other birds, the seals (which were a crucial source of food for the husky teams) and the rare whale sightings.

After a stop at Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where Warr and his fellow Fids got to dance with the local girls and to buy parkas and other polar kit and cameras, he reached his first BAS service station, the British base on Deception Island at the northern end of the Antarctic Peninsula. The island is a partly submerged volcanic caldera which is still active and there are parts of the ash and cinder beach which are warm. The Argentines and Chileans also had bases on the island and Warr writes of many friendly visits exchanges between them and his base- despite the Argentine vs. British dispute over the Malvinas/Falklands.

In addition to his duty as weather man, Warr was also in charge of the "Jesters", the team of huskies at his base on Deception Island. He writes with warmth and fond memory of their personalities and their tendency to sometimes take off with the sledge and leave him behind. He recalls with great sadness the time he had to shoot Saki, an old dog in failing health. In his second year in the South, he got to serve in the "true" Antarctic, as he called it, at Adelaide Island which is 400 miles farther south, well below the Antarctic Circle and 70 degrees S. latitude. While there, he got to work with the "Huns", the huskies of Adelaide and to go on long dog-hauling runs like in the classic days of polar exploration. He notes that the British have phased out the use of dogs in polar service since his time there.

In the final chapters, Warr describes his return to Antarctica as a tourist aboard the Polar Star in 2004. He speaks of his concerns over the impact of the tourist "invasion" of the last pristine place on Earth, the infiltration of the Antarctic ecosystem by pollution from the rest of the planet and the long-term consequences of climate change. There is a bit of nostalgia as he revisits some of the places he last saw as a young man, but he admits that the current state of scientific work in the Antarctic is generally more professional and a lot less primitive than in his day. He concludes that his life in the Antarctic was a unique experience that no other place or time could have provided and it enriched his life and helped to shape him as a man.… (meer)