9 January 2012
12 noon, 58.4º S 145.4º E
It is said that Australians will bet on anything, and so – as is traditional in Australian Antarctic voyaging – a sweep is being conducted on board to guess the timing of the sighting of the first iceberg. As a historian committed to historical commemoration, I of course had no choice but to nominate the same time as the AAE expeditioners sighted their first iceberg, at 4.20 pm (either today or tomorrow).
It is more usual to see the icebergs before the floes and the pack because the bergs cannot be stopped by the west wind – they bulldoze through that barrier and can drift quite far north. In December 1789 the supply ship, HMS Guardian, with 123 people including 25 convicts, and carrying 1003 tons of stores for the infant colony of New South Wales, struck a giant iceberg at 40º South. The bulk of the cargo was got rid of, some of the men abandoned ship and were never seen again, and over eight agonising weeks the Guardian eventually limped back to Cape Town, where salvageable stores were forwarded by available vessels to Sydney. The loss of the Guardian was a bitter blow to the struggling British settlement, one that Governor Phillip judged to be ‘almost fatal to the Colony’.
At noon today we are at 58.4º South 145.4º East, and the ocean is relatively calm and misty with wet snow falling. We are making the most of the gentle sea because we are heading towards a blizzard atCommonwealthBay. Today we have had a safety briefing about the use of the helicopters on board, tried on another type of immersion suit (which must be worn when flying over water), and this afternoon we will have a meeting of the whole ship’s company about logistics for arrival in Commonwealth Bay.
The fact that we have to design our activities around a blizzard off Cape Denison strengthens our kinship with the Aurora expeditioners who, on this day in 1912, were sheltering offshore for two days while a blizzard suspended all unloading. Captain Davis wrote: For the last twenty four hours it has been blowing a gale of wind, the squalls being very violent; indeed how our anchor has held is wonderful. … The wind has been very violent, lifting great sheets of spray off the water …