Bottom of the world

ANTARCTIC CIRCLE — It was a sparkling summer day in the White Continent. An albatross stalked our ship for miles over calm, blue seas polka-dotted with ice floes, past glacier-robed peaks, under an insomniac sun.

The 61,000-ton M.S. Amsterdam shared the lonely Antarctic with convoys of icebergs in fantastic shapes: domes and steeples and sheer cliffs of white or greenish blue, some 60 feet high and a mile long, weighing millions of tons. All relentlessly moved with the circumpolar current.

Chinstrap penguins strutted and preened on a pancake of ice soiled with guano. Some wobbled and slid. Others dove deep for krill, the thumb-sized crustaceans found beneath the ice that in this starkest environment comprise an abundant food supply.

“Thar she blows!” someone shouted. Passengers scurried to train cameras and binoculars on spouting humpbacks just back from wintering in Ecuador.

For me, visiting Antarctica fulfilled a nearly lifelong ambition. In 1958, I was the only reporter aboard a Navy blimp out of East Weymouth, Mass., that tracked the nuclear sub Nautilus on its voyage underneath the North Pole. We hovered overhead when the historic message was flashed: “Nautilus 90 North.” And in 1967, I toured bases from Greenland to Alaska along the distant early warning radar network line.

The bottom of the world is far different from the top. No polar bears, not a tree or bush, and no native humans — except when Argentina and Chile fly expectant mothers into their bases to bolster territorial claims.

Antarctica is surrounded by turbulent seas and rimmed with ice shelves, one of them larger than France. It contains 72 percent of the world’s fresh surface water and 90 percent of the world’s ice. Mountains soar to 15,000 feet above an average mile-deep icecap. Yet this coldest, most remote continent has dry valleys that haven’t seen snow in a million years.

An unforgettable morning was spent cruising the canyons of Lemaire Channel, which is sometimes too ice-jammed for even battering-ram Russian icebreakers. A snowy sheathbill, fluffy as a toy, perched on a deck railing but flew off at the approach of early rising mile-walkers circling the ship three and a half times.

Near Petermann Island, an enormous elephant seal sunbathed on a berg-bit shaped like a frozen deck chair. A distant growl escalated to a thunderous roar as a calving Gibraltar of glacial ice gave birth to another iceberg.

The seas were so uncommonly calm during our journey on the 760-foot-long flagship of the Holland America line that Capt. Jonathan Peter Harris, who had never been south of Cape Horn before, decided to head for the Antarctic Circle. No cruise ship this size had ventured that far south before.

A little after midnight, the Amsterdam was just off Adelaide Island. The global positioning satellite reported us at 66 degrees 33.6769 minutes south latitude, 68 degrees 25.9895 minutes west longitude. The Crow’s Nest, the large picture window bar located directly above the bridge, was standing room only with ecstatic voyagers raising toasts of Chilean champagne.

Some hardy types ventured onto the decks, where the temperature was just below freezing, as the midnight sun dipped briefly beneath the southern horizon, then rose in dazzling glory.

The Rev. John Shanahan, from Wagga Wagga, Australia, celebrated Midnight Mass in the crowded Queen’s Lounge. The sun streaming through the tall windows set and rose on his golden chalice.

Since smoothly navigating the tempestuous Drake Passage, which separates South America from Antarctica, the Amsterdam had altered its routines to protect the delicate environment. The ship’s fog horn did not bellow out the noon hour. No bells clanged the crew watches. The jazz combo unplugged its amplifiers. Charmin’ Carmine, the late night DJ, toned down the volume.

Smoking was banned on deck, and no meals were served outdoors, lest paper napkins blow overboard. Tennis and volleyball courts were roped off, though a dozen brave souls swam in the heated outdoor pool.

Benght Gustaffson, the Amsterdam’s ecological officer, prowled the ship, making sure deck chairs and blankets were tied down, reminding passengers not to feed passing penguins or seals or throw garbage overboard. At Valparaiso, Chile, where the 21-day cruise began, the ship took on a less polluting higher grade diesel fuel.

“Only 12,000 tourists a year visit Antarctica,” Gustaffson observed as he made his rounds, “about the equivalent of a bad day at your Coney Island or Miami Beach. Many of our 1,100 passengers become enthusiastic advocates of protecting this uniquely beautiful land.”

The crew seemed just as excited. The head chef in his tall white hat and dozens of waiters and stewards joined passengers on deck posing for photos against the backdrop of a flattop iceberg twice as tall and three times as long as the ship. During a sudden squall, deckhands had a friendly snowball fight with teenage passengers. Few if any of the 633 crew members had been here before. They too were advised to smear on sun block as a precaution against the hole in the ozone layer.

Harris turned the ship north along a more easterly course, across scenic Paradise Bay, past a couple of noisy penguin rookeries and a Chilean research base. Soon the entrance to horseshoe-shaped Deception Island — a partially submerged volcanic island — came into view.

Near evening a flotilla of spouting minke whales passed within a half-mile of the ship, and as I fumbled with shirt studs for a formal dress dinner, an orca, the killer whale similarly arrayed in black and white, broached less than a harpoon toss from our cabin window.

Later that night the Amsterdam confronted a deep-freeze quagmire of blue and white drifting pack ice. Lecturer Capt. Pat Toomey, an ice pilot who had commanded a Canadian icebreaker and navigated both polar seas, was called to the bridge.

“We stopped the ship and just eased forward into it,” he said. “There was some dangerous ice, the blue stuff, old ice, anything over 3 years old, some perhaps 10,000 years old. I didn’t want to hit that.”

Equipped with the latest bow thrusters, the Amsterdam executed a couple of quick, 90-degree turns that rattled the dishes in the dining room. After several slow hours, we reached open water again.

Day after nearly nightless day, this elegant ship explored an Ice Age world without landing passengers, as ships with less than 100 aboard sometimes do if sea conditions permit.

For history buffs, perhaps the highlight of the voyage was edging in near Elephant Island, where Ernest Shackleton’s party touched land for the first time in 497 days after their ship, the Endurance, was trapped by ice and destroyed in the Weddell Sea. We could see the 100-yard wide pebbly beach at the edge of a glacier, towered over by bald black peaks, where they spent the winter of 1916.

They survived on “seal steaks and penguin hoosh.” Shackleton in a 22-foot open boat daringly crossed 700 miles of the stormiest seas on Earth to reach South Georgia Island. From there, he and two others trekked to a whaling factory; later he returned to rescue his stranded crew.

Ironically, polar explorers back then amused themselves pretty much like today’s cruise passengers. They played cards and board games; read books and kept diaries. They organized debates, lectures, prayer services, sing-alongs, even amateur theatricals not unlike our crew and passenger shows.

Shackleton’s crew played cricket on an ice floe, using a broken oar for a bat, which must have been as bizarre as the Amsterdam’s hole-in-one golf tournament held indoors on main deck.

“Good God, this is an awful place,” British explorer Robert Scott wrote in his journal in January 1912, just before freezing to death with his mates on the way back from the South Pole.

Anyone fortunate enough to visit the Antarctic today, in the comfort of a cruise ship, would view this enchanted land differently.