A Romanian, a ship, and the first Antarctic winter

Chapter

1868 – 1897

Born in Iași

15 November 1868

The Belgica sails

16 August 1897, Antwerp

Joins the ship

Punta Arenas

Emil Racoviță was born in Iași on 15 November 1868 and trained in Paris, then at the Arago marine laboratory in Banyuls-sur-Mer, under Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers. When the Belgian naval officer Adrien de Gerlache went looking for a naturalist for his Antarctic expedition, Racoviță came recommended by Henryk Arctowski, by Lacaze-Duthiers, and by Édouard van Beneden – and the invitation arrived by letter.

The ship was a converted Norwegian whaler, the Patria of 1884, bought in 1896, refitted and renamed Belgica. She sailed from Antwerp on 16 August 1897 – without her naturalist, who had gone ahead from Rio de Janeiro on a faster ship and rejoined at Punta Arenas, the last supply stop.

Racoviță was the expedition's only naturalist: zoologist and botanist, keeper of the shipboard laboratory. Aboard with him were a young Norwegian first mate, Roald Amundsen, and an American surgeon who doubled as photographer, Frederick Cook – names the polar night would make famous.

The aim of antarctic expeditions must, for the present, be scientific. It is of far less importance to reach high latitudes in those quarters than to bring as much scientific information as possible.

Emile Racovitza, Appendix I in Cook (1900), p. 409

Meanwhile Racoviță was 28 when the Belgica sailed from Antwerp.

Chapter

1897 – 1898

The Circle crossed

15 February 1898

Landings

some 20

Beset in the ice

2–5 March 1898

From Punta Arenas the Belgica worked south into uncharted water. Between 23 January and 12 February 1898 the expedition made some 20 landings, charting the strait de Gerlache first called Belgica Strait – the Gerlache Strait of today's maps.

On 15 February 1898 the ship crossed the Antarctic Circle. In January a Norwegian seaman, Carl August Wiencke, had already been washed overboard – Wiencke Island keeps his name. Along the strait the naturalist watched penguins in their thousands: Cook put one colony at 40,000 birds.

Pushing west past the strait, the Belgica entered thick pack ice on 28 February 1898 and was beset within days – the sources give 2 to 5 March – near Peter I Island, at 70°20′ S, 85° W. There was no way back: the expedition would winter where the ice carried it.

Meanwhile Wiencke Island and Danco Island are both named for men of this voyage.

Chapter

1898 – 1899

The polar night

17 May – 23 July 1898

The dead

2: Danco and Wiencke

Free of the ice

14 March 1899

The sun set on 17 May 1898 and did not return until 23 July. Cook diagnosed what he called polar anaemia: pallor, heart and head complaints, men unable to concentrate. De Gerlache and Lecointe grew so ill they wrote their wills; Cook and Amundsen took command. The cure was fresh meat – raw penguin and seal, rich in a vitamin C no one had yet named.

Two men died. Lieutenant Emile Danco, worn by a weak heart and exhaustion, died on 5 June 1898 – Danco Island keeps his name. And the darkness broke at least one mind: Cook wrote of a sailor forced 'to the verge of insanity', who recovered with the returning sun; the Norwegian seaman Adam Tollefsen, taken by paranoia and delusions, had to be institutionalised on the return.

When the sun came back, the ice did not release the ship. Explosives failed in the cold – tonite, Cook wrote, 'will cut no ice' – so sixteen men sawed a canal of some 2,200 feet through ice up to seven feet thick, eight hours a day from the evening of 11 January 1899. The Belgica stirred on 14–15 February and stood clear of the ice on 14 March 1899, at 70°30′ S, 103° W.

It is but slowly that this blackness of the polar night is dissolved by the whiteness of the coming day... We have all felt the effects of the night severely. The death of Danco, and also the insanity of a sailor, are due to this withdrawal of light.

F. A. Cook, Through the First Antarctic Night (1900), ch. 27, p. 365

If we are to get freedom, we must seek it by our own muscular efforts with the saw and the axe.

F. A. Cook, Through the First Antarctic Night (1900), p. 395

Meanwhile The sawn canal measured some 2,200 feet – over 650 metres.

Chapter

1899 – 2011

Cétacés

1903

The Cluj institute

26 April 1920

Law-Racoviță

2006

The Belgica reached Punta Arenas on 28 March 1899 and Antwerp on 5 November 1899, to state honours. Racoviță came home with 1,200 zoological and 400 botanical samples – the first collections ever made beyond the Antarctic Circle – including the type specimens of the flightless midge Belgica antarctica and of the hairgrass Deschampsia antarctica.

The whale monograph Cétacés (1903) stayed the reference work for years; 74 specialists worked through his material. A 513-page seals manuscript stayed unfinished in Bucharest. And the caves came next: the 1907 Essai founded biospeleology, and the law of 26 April 1920 raised the world's first speleological institute at Cluj, under his direction until his death in November 1947.

The honours followed the man. Louis Dollo named a Southern Ocean fish genus Racovitzia for him in 1900; three islands off Graham Land bear the French spelling, Racovitza; and Romania's Antarctic station, raised on the Larsemann Hills in 2006, is the Law-Racoviță Station – Law-Racoviță-Negoiță since December 2011.

Meanwhile The station bearing his name works only in the southern summer.