Terra Incognita

As if it knew I wanted to read it, my copy of Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita turned up, and I've been completely immersed in it. [You can buy a used copy for a penny on amazon!] It's hard to say why I love this book so much. It's a conventional travel book in lots of ways – writer goes on journey and recounts experiences – but it is so much more because she is a very good writer, and she goes to such a fascinating place, Antarctica. Today it's reasonably common for people to go to Antarctica on cruises; I was reading about a group of musicians and artists who went not so long ago as part of the Cape Farewell project (amazing, by the way; I wonder if I could ever come up with a reason for them to send me). But when Sara Wheeler went back in the 90s there was absolutely no precedent for anyone except Victorian polar explorers and more latterly scientists (who she nicknames 'beards').

She stayed for some months at the American McMurdo base, then at the South Pole itself, before transferring to the English base at Rothera, and finally returning for a final blast of the arctic summer at McMurdo. The story of her own experiences and the people she meets in these harsh, lonely and beautiful places is juxtaposed with her narratives of the great polar explorers in history, Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Nansen. The continent itself is as much of a character, and it's hard not to be swept along with her as she falls in love with the place.

Werner Herzog took the same idea in his recent film Encounters at the Edge of the World, but while Herzog's documentary is a mixture of quirky characters and the fearsome implacability of nature, Wheeler is more interested in human nature, and the spiritual lure of the white continent. For the great explorers of the past, as for herself, Antarctica is the ultimate challenge, but also a place of great peace and tranquility, that offers her some answers to the many questions of human existence. It's the ultimate travel book.

'We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time'
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding