An account of four winters spent almost a century ago on the South Orkney Islands, a frozen, uninhabited archipelago north-east of Antarctica, has been published in English for the first time.
Telling of everyday life, from ice fishing to the amputation of gangrenous fingers, the chronicle is the only autobiographic account of life on the islands, located 670km north of Antarctica. It was written by José Manuel Moneta, a technical officer in Argentina’s National Meteorological Service who spent four winters on the archipelago in the 1920s, and was published in Spanish between 1939 and 1963.
“Although not the first, I was one of the earliest Argentines to spend long, drawn-out years surrounded by Antarctic ice thousands of years old. We lived in a small, basic wooden hut, with a simple diet supplemented by local seals and penguins. We had no company other than four or five companions thrown together by chance, with no news of anything, or of anyone, during our interminable year of voluntary exile,” writes Moneta, in a translation by Kathleen Skilton and Kenn Back, published this week in English for the first time by Bernard Quaritch under the title Four Antarctic Years in the South Orkney Islands.
Moneta writes of the penguins and the seals that the team would hunt, of collecting ice to melt for fresh water, of travelling through the highlands over glaciers and waiting for the annual arrival of a relief ship.
Daily life was challenging; Moneta’s living quarters were “a two and a half metre-long space in which bunks, table, chairs and wash stand all have to fit. Not so much a living room or bedroom, more like an actual prison cell”. He gives an account of the amputation of one man’s fingers after gangrene sets in: “He was not given any anaesthetic, there was none to give, not even any local one to dull the pain.”
And he tells of the “infinite solitude” of the islands, which means that “the most trivial incident, of no significance whatever in any other part of the inhabited world, was reckoned here, in the circumscribed confines of our regimented life, to be an extraordinary event”.
“On one day it occurred to me to open one of my trunks in which I kept books, clothes and other personal effects. Much to my astonishment I saw a moth fly out from between the folds of a woollen jersey. My voice sounded like the alarm, the same tone that I would have used in a genuine emergency ‘A moth, a moth!’ ‘Where? Where is it?’ they all shouted. All my companions wanted to see that minute lepidopteron whose larvae, concealed in some garment, had come from the mainland, and continued to survive sustained by the warmth from the stoves.”
The book’s editor, RK Headland, said that Moneta’s diary was “an exceptional record of the period of Antarctic history”.
“Such detailed records from remote polar regions are sparse and valuable as current [climatic] changes become increasingly significant. The style of life, almost a century ago, with the adoption of the very new technology of radio communication, is comprehensively described by a young man while he gained almost five years of Antarctic experience,” said Headland, a senior associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and recipient of the Polar Medal in 1984.
“British and Argentine relations in the Antarctic have not always been good, but from 1959 – when the Antarctic Treaty was made with the South Orkney Islands in the region it covers – scientific and, to some extent, logistical cooperation has been effective. This applies generally to all countries involved in the Antarctic – and historical understanding is a general benefit in understanding these still very remote locations,” he added.
Moneta’s daughters, Dora Moneta de Landívar and Martha Moneta de López Naguil, said they were “deeply touched” to see the English translation of their father’s work.
“The Antarctic was his lifelong passion and he kept his special interest in the South Orkney Islands continuously, visiting them to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his first expedition just a month prior to his death,” they said. “We hope the English version will contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration of which our father was a part.”
