Gavin Francis - Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence, and Emperor Penguins

PRAISE FOR EMPIRE ANTARCTICA

A book full of wonder. Brilliantly imagined, superbly brought to life.

Sunday Times (Travel Book of the Month November 2012)

It is over 100 years since Ernest Shackleton published The Heart of the Antarctic, but the white continents mystery endures, and Franciss lyrical and enjoyable account of 14 months living at the remote British Halley research station goes some way to explaining why.

Financial Times Books of the Year

A beautiful hymn to limitless solitude... His bracing year spent among emperor penguins presents an ordeal that is also a joy. And its beautifully written on every page.

Scotsman Books of the Year

He perceives the wilderness of snow and ice in color and experiences it as continuous sights, sounds, and sensations, writing as vividly and as fiercely in darkness at noon or in sunlight at midnight.

The Times

Part-travelogue, part memoir, part natural history book, a fascinating, lyrical account of one of the strangest places on earth and its majestic inhabitants.

Esquire

Francis best writing (and it is excellent)... is Robert Macfarlane on ice. This writing achieves the quilted quality of silence, and through it we are brought to a new landscape of words.

Literary Review

An awe-inspiring memoir of a modern-day pioneer who writes with a poetic style and descriptive flourish that is part education, part enthrallment, and wholly entertaining.

Daily Record

He writes beautifully about the strange other-worldly allure of this habitat of ice and snow.

Metro

[An] intense and lyrical portrait of the slowly changing polar seasons... shines with a clarity and lyricism descended from Thoreau.

TLS

Just when it seemed there wasnt another good book to be written about this under-inhabited, over-described continent, Gavin Francis has gone and produced one. I read it fast, in two sittings, drawn onwards by the pleasure the calmly elegant prose was bringing me, and by the access it offered me into that strange white world of Antarctica, and the existences of some of those who live and work there (human and avian). There are numerous dog-eared pages in my proof copy, folded over to mark up a detail about Antarctica that Id not encountered before (the emperor penguin who burst the leather bonds with which hed been restrained just by inhaling), or a turn of phrase to relish (Seasons felt meaningless without the testimony of trees. I waited for the sun.)

Robert Macfarlane

A finely written account of an extreme experience of the Antarctic, worthy to stand beside some of the great travel narratives in the English language.

Dame Margaret Drabble, RSL Ondaatje Prize judge

One of the best travel titles I have read in a long time. Thoughtful, lyrical, extremely well written, its a triumph.

Giles Foden, Cond Nast Traveler

This is the sort of book that gives obsession a very good name. Here, in a cold, silent place you realize that obsession is another name for love. And love leads to extraordinary and beautiful writingthis is a wonderful book.

Sara Maitland, From the Forest, A Book of Silence

An extraordinary book lyrical, precise, intoxicating and with a remarkable spiritual depth.

AL Kennedy

One of those rare books that leaves you with an almost breathless sense of the wonders of the planet. Beautiful, erudite, and informative, it speaks joyously of the indomitability of Man and the natural world alike.

Esther Woolfson, Corvus, Field Notes From a Hidden City

Selected as a Book of the Year by Andrew Greig, Sunday Herald

Selected as a Book of the Year by Lesley Glaister, Scotsman

Selected as a Summer Read 2013 by Colin Thubron, Observer

Empire Antarctica

Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins

GAVIN FRANCIS

COUNTERPOINT

BERKELEY

Copyright Gavin Francis 2013

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Chatto & Windus

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of non-fiction and the characters and events described are real. It has however, been written several years after those events, albeit with the use of diaries and notes taken at the time. The author wishes to acknowledge that there may be slight discrepancies between dialogues recounted in the book, or in the chronology of events, and those that actually took place, though these discrepancies have been kept to a minimum

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Francis, Gavin.

Empire Antarctica : ice, silence, and emperor penguins / Gavin Francis.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-61902-259-1

1. Francis, GavinTravelAntarctica. 2. AntarcticaDescription and travel. 3. Natural historyAntarctica. I. Title.

G860.F73 2013

919.89DC23

2013018055

COUNTERPOINT

1919 Fifth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In the hope that book dedications, like all the best stories, gain in being shared,

to Esa

for the space and the silence

and also to

Allan Thomas, Annette Ryan (ne Faux), Ben Norrish,

Craig Nicholson, Elaine Cowie, Graeme Barton,

Mark Maltby, Mark Stewart, Patrick McGoldrick,

Paul Torode, Robert Shortman, Russ Locke & Stuart Colley;

the penguins were good company, but so were they.

CONTENTS

Maps

x

xi

Illustrations in the text

Plate illustrations

All photographs, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.

Maps by Paul Torode.

It is a wonderful place we are in, all new to the world, and yet I feel that I cannot describe it. There is an impression of limitless solitude about it all.

Ernest Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic

Autumn in Antarctica: sunrise and sunset merge in firestorms of light that seem to warn of the coming darkness. At 75 South the polar night of winter will last three and a half months. Light in Antarctica is refracted and reflected between ice and sky as though through a hall of mirrors; the continent bathes in the colours of flame as the autumn days grow colder. Last years sea ice has all been broken out by the storms of summer. It is April, soon after the autumnal equinox, and the refreezing of the sea is already well advanced. Emperor penguins are returning from a summer fishing, fat and gleaming, to mate on the new sea ice close to the edges of the continent. They are the only species evolved to survive these coasts through the winter. That they breed through it, carrying eggs on their feet as they shuffle through the darkness, is one of the wonders of the natural world.