A History of the World in 50 Novels: 49 - "Everland," by Rebecca Hunt

A history of the world in fifty novels could hardly be expected to include each and every country (there are currently, depending upon one's stance in relation to contested cases, somewhere between 193 and 196 of them), but should surely alight on all the continents. There is, however, one such continent that has not yet featured on our journey: the last of all the world's continents to be explored and settled; Antarctica.

The geographers of the ancient world speculated on the likely existence of such a continent, if only because they imagined that the Earth should have some balance and symmetry to it (contrary to popular myth, the greatest minds of the ancient and medieval worlds understood perfectly well that the Earth was spherical, even if they believed that the Sun, and the visible planets, revolved around it), but it was not actually sighted by humans until 1820 (Captain Cook's ships had sailed within 120 kilometres in 1773), and only in the Twentieth Century did serious exploration begin.

Expeditions led by Robert Falcon Scott (1901-4) and Ernest Shackleton (1907-9) succeeded in mapping substantial portions of the continent, but it was an expedition led by the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, that first reached the geographical South Pole in December 1911, beating a rival effort, led by Scott by a few weeks. Scott and his four companions all perished during the course of their return journey.

Roald Amundsen and his party at the South Pole, 1911. Photo: Olav Bjaaland, Project Gutenberg (image is in the Public Domain).

Members of Scott's 1912 party. Photo: Henry Bowers (image is in the Public Domain).

Iceberg grotto, Scott Expedition, 1911-13. Photo: National Library of New Zealand (licensed under CCA).

Antarctica today is divided between the United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Norway, Australia, Chile, and Argentina (other countries, including Russia, have outstanding claims), and has up to five thousand people living there at any one time (biologists, oceanographers, geologists and their support teams), on a number of research stations. Mineral exploitation and military activity are forbidden by international treaty, but those who have visited the continent (and I am not among them) are only too aware of the fragility of its unique ecosystem.

Research stations on Antarctica. Image: Teetaweepo (licensed under CCA).

Rebecca Hunt's novel, Everland, chronicles two fictional expeditions to the fictional Antarctic island of Everland (which, having an active volcano, sounds a lot like Ross Island), one in 1913, the other in 2012. Both expeditions involve three people, but, in the first case, all are male; whereas, in the second, the party consists of a man and two women. In a land in which nothing decays, the modern expedition is haunted by reminders of the earlier one; and, in a place where human lives are stretched to the limits of their endurance, ideas of morality, duty, courage, and even truth, are similarly exercised, no less for the modern characters than for their predecessors a century before.

Mount Erebus, on Ross Island. Photo: jeaneeem (licensed under CCA).

"April 1913

Running on the beach.Chaotic noises, busy. A call; a male voice shouting in the wind. The sound of something happening in the surf. It was a dream, perhaps, or perhaps a memory leaching out. Such a sweet dream, though. 'Ship-O! ... Napps ... Are you there? Are you all well?'

A glimmer of consciousness brought him back into the over-turned dinghy. He remembered Everland as a colour, an immense blackness, where the cycle of time had dilated to a single endless night. But to permit even a fraction of wakefulness was to suffer. The pain was monstrous. Think of God, if at all. He heard digging. Snow was being shovelled away from the dinghy's buried sides. 'We have him! We have one of them!' 

A burst of activity surrounded him as men crawled into the dinghy. His arms were clenched around his head, covering his face, and they talked in low whispers, afraid to touch him. Someone said tentatively, 'Is he alive?'

'I don't know, I can't tell. Where's the doctor? Hurry, get Addison.'

Boots pelted off across the shingle.

'Napps? ... Millet-Bass? ...' Men were searching the beach and yells echoed from every direction. 'Any sign?' they called to each other."

Members of Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition, 1909 (image is in the Public Domain).

Scott's hut at Cape Evans. Photo: Kuno Lechner (licensed under GNU).

 "November 2012

The Antarctic base Aegeus was currently home to an international community of one hundred and fifty people. It was a stark industrial hamlet of featureless buildings with rough roads bulldozed into the snow. Metal and scrap were piled up next to sealed storage drums, lengths of pipe, and stacked wooden pallets bound with plastic cable ... With its lights out and curtains taped shut against the brilliant evening sunshine, the common room was now dark apart from the whirling glow of a projector screen ... As a tribute to Brix, Jess and Decker, the film chosen obviously had to be the old sixties classic Everland, which was based on Captain Lawrence's famous book about the Kismet expedition ... Tomorrow, Decker, Jess and Brix would begin a comprehensive study of the island, becoming the first party in a hundred years to relocate there for two continuous months. Pretty much everyone at Aegeus, regardless of qualification, had competed to be one of those selected."

Adelie Penguins in Antarctica. Photo: Jason Auch (licensed under CCA).

Dumont-d'Urville Station, a modern Antarctic base. Photo: Samuel Blanc (licensed under CCA).

The stories of the two expeditions are intertwined throughout the novel, and the reader is frequently called upon to question what actually happened in either case. The contrasts, in terms of technology and society, are evident, but so are the similarities, as the challenges of an extreme environment force the characters, both modern and historical, to choose between altruism and self-preservation; and between truthful and invented narratives as to how they behaved when the chips were really down.  

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.