Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton

Author:Julian Sancton [Sancton, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

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On the clear and frigid evening of June 3, Cook left the ship with his camera and tripod on his shoulder and walked about a hundred yards across the pack under a dazzlingly bright moon. By its light, even the most distant icebergs stuck out neatly from the horizon. The doctor cut through a maze of hummocks and ridges caused by the previous week’s pressures. He planted the tripod in the ice, turned his camera toward the Belgica, and opened the shutter. A spectacular image filtered through the Zeiss lens and began to impress itself on the light-sensitive silver salt emulsion that coated the camera’s glass plate.

Cook paced vigorously to keep warm, unable to return to the ship lest his movement ruin the exposure. A self-taught photographer, he wasn’t sure how long to wait; all he knew was that the ship had never looked more beautiful and there would likely never be a better chance to capture her at night. As fear and anxiety took hold of the Belgica, Cook’s curiosity and passion for polar work were undiminished. It was as if he could fly at will above the concerns of the pack, much like a cartoon Racovitza had drawn, depicting the doctor as a winged, angel-like savior.

After an hour and a half, Cook delicately closed the shutter, hurried back aboard, and stomped the snow off his boots. Impatient to see the photograph, he walked through de Gerlache’s cabin and into the darkroom. In the chamber’s dim red glow, Cook plunged the clear glass plate into a vat of developer. The specter of a ship gradually appeared as the exposed silver salts darkened in the chemical bath. When he was satisfied with the image, he dropped the plate into acetic acid to stop the development process. Next, he would fix it, eliminate all remnants of silver salts, and render the negative impervious to light. During this step, he moved slowly and tried not to breathe, aware that the slightest false movement could prove deadly. Having used up all of the sodium thiosulfate—a fixer commonly known as hypo—in the early part of the voyage, when he was still getting used to his equipment and to the subtleties of photographing in polar light, the doctor had improvised a solution. He had read in an old issue of a British magazine lying around the ship that hydrocyanic acid, an extremely toxic poison, was once used as a fixer for daguerreotypes. Conveniently, Racovitza had brought twenty gallons of it on board to kill animals for specimens. (“One drop on the tongue,” Cook wrote, “and it was all over for the animal.”) After experimenting with various dilutions, Cook had found a formula that did the trick. He poured a bath of the stuff, which smelled faintly of almonds, and daintily submerged the negative plate. “Needless to say,” Cook wrote, “nobody remained in the darkroom during fixing.” The poisonous fumes eventually escaped the unventilated darkroom through the door to de Gerlache’s cabin.

Once the cyanide was washed away, Cook could finally contemplate his work in unfiltered light.

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