April 25, 2004

This American author and traveller is cut from much the same stone as Shackleton or Amundsen, and one can sense in him a yearning for the heroic age of Antarctic travel, but his own expedition to the region and his resulting book are in a very different category from their works. We are now well in the age of polar tourism, but the author is a tourist in a million. One senses that, in that sublimely beautiful but barren world of ice, saltwater and rock, he found a place attuned to his own preoccupations. End of the Earth contains some of Peter Matthiessen’s finest nature writing.

Along with the poetry come the facts. I found one error: he suggests that the albatross is a harbinger of death, when it had no such association for sailors, while Coleridge in “The ancient mariner” used the bird as a symbol of some eternal life force, the slaying of which brings disaster. But setting such trivialities aside, one finds Matthiessen as familiar with the geological and hydrographic forces behind the continent’s formation as he is with the biological details of its native species. Into this basic matrix of natural historical information he inserts vignettes of past polar travel, former exploitation and the present political and environmental context.

Yet his constant return to the environmental problems triggered my one disagreement with the author. Matthiessen, the campaigner, lectures long and hard over the issue of global warming. It is particularly relevant to Antarctica, since much of the data confirming its existence come from there, while its potentially catastrophic effects would flow from the melting of the polar icecap. But the bow of a cruise ship is not the place from which to harangue us.

However reluctant a passenger he may be, Matthiessen is himself aboard the juggernaut of environmental destruction. As if aware of this moral ambiguity, he reserves his deepest scorn for the stupid, criminal neglect of global climate change by the present US administration.

But End of the Earth should not be read as a call to arms. Few if any authors on the region have so successfully compressed into 280 pages the basic outlines of Antarctic life and our relationship to its pristine abundance. I suspect it will become standard reading for most visitors following in his wake. —Dawn/Guardian News Service

End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica
By Peter Matthiessen
National Geographic
ISBN 0792250591
288pp. £14.26

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)