South of Sixty: Life on an Antarctic Base is the lively story of Warr's two years spent as an FID—or member of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, the precursor to the British Antarctic Survey—at British bases B and T (Deception Island and Adelaide Island, respectively) beginning in 1963, interestingly contrasted with his tourist journey to the same area in 2005.
Warr went south as a 20-year-old and freely admits that he did a lot of growing up on the Ice. Much of the time at Deception was devoted to socializing with the Argentines and Chileans living at neighboring bases, though the FIDs outvisited their neighbors by a factor of three (“Were we too familiar?” he asks). One FID made a three-week visit to Chile’s nearby Pedro Aguirre Cerda station, while another spent a long time recuperating at Argentina’s Decepción station (a nine-mile walk around Port Foster and over a glacier from Base B) after he damaged his knee while sliding down an icy patch of snow. The omission of this member’s extended stay from the base’s monthly reports to HQ, Warr says, may have been “an acknowlegement that some British bases did not have adequate medical coverage.”
Drinking was a big part of life at Base B, and the subject gets its own chapter in Warr’s book. The house drink was “moose milk”—tinned condensed milk and 160 proof navy rum—served in a “FID’s tot” equal to three standard tots. Snipping the ends off visitors’ neckties was another base tradition; the collection tacked up on the walls of the station’s bar included one snippet from the Duke of Edinburgh.
Warr was in charge of the Jesters, Base B’s husky team, and some of his most interesting writing concerns the dogs. The winter of 1964 was a hard one, and Deception’s harbor, Port Foster, froze all the way across. Warr took a team across the sea ice to the Argentine base and even out to Neptunes Bellows, where there was open water. On another occasion, he had to put down an arthritic dog named Saki. Tears filled his eyes as he walked back from Neptune’s Window, having dispatched the whimpering animal with a .45 after first just grazing it, and then pushed the corpse over the cliff edge.
Warr’s second year was spent much further south at Adelaide Island (“South of Sixty”), which he found “less gloomy” than “damp and dark” Deception, and with more snow, “everything looked white and clean.” Adelaide, unfortunately, was a “static base,” at which FIDs did no sledging trips, geologizing or surveying in the field. That meant base members’ time, outside of their indoor work, was their own. Warr took the Huns, Base T’s huskies, on several sledge trips.
In an interesting aside about early Antarctic tourism, Warr notes that “an unusual rumour” reached Adelaide Island in 1964: a New York tourist company would be visiting the Antarctic for the first time, charging clients the “outrageous” sum of $3,000 each. Though base members were skeptical of the report, they nevertheless “got busy making souvenirs of genuine seal leather belts, wooden mugs, etc.” Unfortunately, no tourists turned up.
But in February 2005—39 years after he left the Antarctic—Warr himself took an Antarctic tourist cruise aboard Polar Star; half of his fellow passengers had worked at British Antarctic bases between 1948 and the 1980s. Wined and dined at Rothera, the ex-FIDs compared notes with the station’s staff:
“We made an effort to make sense of their regulated and regimented life. The UK headquarters had a lot more input into this base than it did to our more isolated bases of the past. The outside world could not be ignored as daily e-mails poured in. Some Rothera personnel deliberately did not communicate home in order to have some semblance of an isolated Antarctic experience… the personnel, especially in summer, seemed to observe the Antarctic as if from afar rather than being part of it.”
The “real Antarctica,” the former FIDs felt, “had disappeared.” Other things had changed, too. Women arrived, huskies departed.
One happy result of all the changes, however, is that “the death rate in the last 30 years has been about one-third what ours was,” Warr writes: approximately “two deaths every three years,” from 1944-1965.
In all, it was a rather melancholy pilgrimage, with stops at Stonington Island, Adelaide Island (where high seas prevented a landing) and the Argentine Islands base, now Ukraine’s Vernadsky station (where ice prevented a landing). Of Port Lockroy, the former British base now turned museum/post office/souvenir stand, Warr writes: “There had to be one Antarctic tourist trap.”
At Deception, where a 1969 volcanic eruption and ensuing mudslide badly damaged Base B, Warr found that the ruins “did not have anything left that I could hold on to…sometimes one cannot go home again.”
Finally, a note about photography, which Warr says was the main diversion for most base personnel, second only to their jobs: “Photographs captured the Antarctic; it was proof that we had been to a unique place.” Thus it is disappointing that the choice of color photographs reproduced in the book (there are 16) is not as interesting as it could be. There are ordinary shots of penguins, a fur seal, a husky…in short, photos that can be seen in nearly every book about the Antarctic ever published.
What we would like to see are the photos that Warr describes taking: “the brave FID fighting his way up the ‘high street’ in a blizzard”; a husky hanging from a tripod to be weighed; the author himself “nicely lubricated,” eyes closed and head thrown back, singing a mournful Negro spiritual; or even the midwinter celebration dinner menus or the British Antarctic Survey Driving Licenses they carefully made up. These are images unique to the narrative, not generic Antarctic pix, and this book would have been improved by their inclusion.
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