The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson

Author:Juliet Nicolson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2009-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

10

Release

Early Winter 1919

The skies were filling with spectacular and record-breaking machines. Alcock and Brown’s recent crossing of the Atlantic by air in June was still on everyone’s mind when on 12 November a Vickers Vimy aeroplane departed from Hounslow airfield in Middlesex on a journey bound for the other side of the world. The Australian Captain Ross Smith, a pilot with an impressive flying record from the war, and his brother Keith Macpherson Smith planned to make the journey with twenty-one refuelling stops, including landings at Lyons, Rome, Cairo, Damascus, Basra, Bander Abbas, Karachi, Delhi, Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, and Bima, a distance of 11,340 miles. The journey felt like a means of escape to the other side of the world, to a continent where memories were not so clamorous. The Australian government offered a £10,000 prize for the successful completion of the journey.

On the same day Handley Page transport announced the production of an aeroplane large enough to carry fifteen people from London to Paris in two hours ten minutes and in considerable comfort. Passengers would be seated in velvet-cushioned armchairs, their feet resting on fitted carpets, their reading matter illuminated by electric light. The world seemed to be shrinking.

A month later a mesmerised audience watched as Sir Ernest Shackleton presented the extraordinary and heroic pictures of his attempt to cross the Antarctic and reach the South Pole. His 350-ton pine, oak and greenheart ship, Endurance, had left Plymouth on 8 August 1914 with a crew of twenty-seven men. England had been at war with Germany for four days. As the war continued, thousands of miles away the men of the Endurance struggled through the ice stacks, along needle-thin channels, using the ship as a battering ram as the ice floes, sounding like ‘heavy distant surf’, rose up into gargantuan towers all around the ship. Icebergs measuring thirty-two miles long and a hundred and fifty feet high resembled avenues of hostile skyscrapers in which no human could ever take up residence.

Eventually ice had defeated the expedition. But to the lasting benefit of movie-going audiences, Australian cameraman Frank Hurley had made his way as fast as possible towards the listing, leaking, creaking, paralysed hulk of the ship. He dived into the freezing water of the hold, managing to rescue his films and photographic plates, smashing many but happily not all of them in his urgency to get back to safety.

The resulting film, entitled simply South, made the wintry London weather seem benign in contrast to the snow-bound beauty of the scenes shimmering on the screen, the ship’s intricate rigging frosted with icicles. The seventy accompanying sledge dogs, half mad with hunger, existed on seal meat, emperor penguins and bleeding steaks gashed from the barnacle-encrusted flanks of furious bull sea-elephants. The men of the expeditionary force chewed hard on their pipes as they stared into the camera lens. One man provided the company with the ‘vital mental tonic’ of a banjo, while arms were encased to the elbow in vast fur gauntlets.

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