2023-12-13 10:12:03
In Antarctica it makes sense to perhaps open a stove shop, a penguin farm or even a sleigh rental stand, but few would have thought of it, as the commander did. Adrien de Gerlache, install a madhouse on the ice. The idea was very productive, since there are few places more suffocating and capable of driving a human being crazy, but obviously he did not do it on purpose nor was he able to put walls up. The maritime expedition led by the young and arrogant Belgian in the summer of 1897 entered, largely due to his decisions, into a state of absolute madness where there was no shortage of tragedy, illness or darkness.
In the book ‘A madhouse at the end of the world’ (Captain Swing) Julian Sancton narrates with all kinds of details, including sexual matters, the odyssey lived for almost a year by 19 sailors and scientists trapped in the frozen sea of Bellingshausen, in the extreme northwest of Antarctica. The American journalist learned about this story from an article in the ‘New Yorker’ magazine about how NASA prepared future missions to Mars by studying the polar expeditions of the early 20th century and set out to understand how ‘El Belgica’ could reach such a level of boredom.
The solitary ship had left Ostend on August 23, 1897 with 13 Belgians, 10 foreigners and two cats (one of them also ended up showing signs of mental illness) with the aim of finding the south magnetic pole, in Victoria Land, south of new zealand, at the same time that scientists collected samples and learned from the fauna that survived south of Tierra del Fuego. A very ambitious company that, after overcoming a mutiny in Punta Arenas and a near shipwreck near Ushuaia, ran into disaster when its arrogant commander decided to spend the winter in Antarctica.
The disease is rampant
Trapped in an endless field of ice, petrified without being able to move forward or backward, the first horseman of the Apocalypse the group faced was avoiding boredom. Each one fought it in their own way: some, trying to open a channel in the solid ice and others investigating the unexplored. Even when the darkness was not complete, the Romanian biologist Emil Racovitza found “the flowering plant that grows southernmost on Earth, Deschampsia antarcticaa very scarce and resistant grass, capable of withstanding the cold, the wind and the poverty of the soil” and “collected mites from the rocks covered with lichens and discovered the largest and strictly terrestrial animal that lives in Antarctica: a mosquito of five centimeters, black, unable to fly, known as Belgica antarctica in honor of the expedition.
Then, the days began to get shorter and apathy blocked both sailors and scientists. The stories and anecdotes that until recently caused great laughter became, due to being repeated so much, an unpleasant hammering. «They sit, downcast and sad, at the laboratory table and the forecastle, lost in melancholic daydreams; “There are rare occasions when someone wakes up and tries to convey vain enthusiasm,” the doctor wrote. Frederick Cook, who would later be remembered for claiming to have been the first explorer to reach the North Pole.
The second challenge was overcoming a diet low in vitamin C for an entire year, including an entire winter without seeing sunlight. This caused scurvy and anemia to spread among men, which he did know how to alleviate. Cookwho recommended eating rare penguin meat just as he had seen local tribes do.
Attempt to open a channel to free the ship. ABC
Along with the American, the other key figure in saving the group from total catastrophe was another great snow hero, Amundsen, the first to conquer the South Pole and that on the ‘Belgica’ he casually served as helmsman. It cannot be said that the Norwegian, cold as the ice that surrounded everything, kept the crew’s morale high, but he made crucial decisions such as making sealskin coats and others that were going to be key in future adventures. of the.
However, what damaged the crew most were not physical problems, but pains of the soul: madness, a symphony of constant howling, men who neither spoke nor heard, and completely broken minds. The gallery of junk of the expeditionaries, who created the Order of the Penguin, included a variety worthy of a Hieronymus painting. The sailor Tollefsen, without going any further, “faced with the constant pressure of the ice, succumbed to horror and went mad as he contemplated the overwhelming spectacle of the sublime, terrified at the fate that never ceased to stalk him.”
The diversity of the group, where everyone spoke their own language, increased the isolation
A sailor named Van Mirlo She suddenly started shouting, “Captain, she’s still alive!” seeing, or at least believing she saw, that a recently dead seal that she was carrying on her shoulders was still convulsing. The diversity of the group, where everyone spoke their own language, increased the isolation and persecution mania among its members.
If the paranoia did not end in a bloodbath it was because ‘El Belgica’ had the strength of your doctor. Cook was a pioneer in the mental treatment of groups subjected to extreme isolation, not only by monitoring each person on board one by one, ensuring that they did not completely disconnect from the awake world, but by putting into practice such revolutionary techniques as the call ‘baked treatment’a primitive attempt at phototherapy using campfires to combat depression caused by continued light deprivation.
Finally, on November 16, the sun returned, but not sanity. «They had spent the winter dreaming of the sun, but the persistence of the light was as disturbing as the perpetual night. When the day was clear, not a single shadow could be seen on the ice,” he writes. Julian Sancton about the change of tyranny, from absence to excess of light. The months continued to punish the ship, motionless, almost lifeless. It was not until February 12, 1899, when the banks of the canal began to separate and it was possible to blow up the rest of the ice with explosives, that the crew allowed themselves to breathe a sigh of relief and convince themselves that the nightmare could come to an end. A few days later they left to return home as if everything that had happened had been a bad dream.
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