Free A Grue Of Ice by Geoffrey Jenkins Page A

one of those violent gusts which come down the glacier near Neny Island."
    " In other words," smiled Upton, " you thanked God and the Norwegians who first set up the emergency depots they
    call roverhullets throughout the Antarctic and its islands."
    " It was the Scots who started the idea, on Laurie Island, in the South Orkneys, sixty years ago . . ." began Reidar Bull. I stood aside as the argument developed, as only sailors and whalermen can argue. Mikklesen's shrewd formulation of the illegality of the proposed expedition worried me. There could be no doubt that, in terms of the Antarctic Treaty, which twelve of the major powers with possessions and interests in Antarctica, including Britain, the United States and Norway, had signed, we were infringing Norwegian territorial waters. If we were caught, Upton might buy or talk his way out of trouble, but for me it would be different. I, a Royal Society researcher, would acquire a life-long stigma for throwing in my lot with an expedition whose one and only
    purpose was gain, Upton's gain. In fact, the whole
    business could lead to a small shooting war if Norway got
    tough. That is exactly what had happened when Onassis allegedly flouted the two-hundred-mile offshore whaling limit declared by Peru, Ecuador and Chile in 1954. His Olympic Challenger expedition, as Mikklesen had pointed out, had been bombed by the Peruvian Air Force and seized by the Peruvian Navy. That had created a major diplomatic incident, and the ships had been released only on payment of £1,000,000 indemnity by Lloyd's.
    The breeding-ground of the Blue Whale was far more
    important to Norway than Onassis' mere infringement of whaling limits. That was where the parallel between the Olympic Challenger expedition and Upton's ended. Had the Olympic Challenger had on board an oceanographer like me who could have nailed down a killer-current the Peruvians
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    call El Nino—a warm, less saline stream which blitzes the
    life-flow of the Peru Current and kills fish, whales and seabirds by the million off the coast of South America—the knowledge in itself would have been worth that £1,000,000 indemnity many times over.
    The Albatross' Foot represented a mighty challenge. What, I asked myself as the catcher skippers grew more noisy, if a similar challenge had been rejected by the man who, only since World War I, had revolutionised all ideas on the great Gulf Stream itself? He was laughed to scorn
    —but he proved his theory. Until ten years ago the United States was unaware that yet a second great Gulf Stream, known as the Cromwell Current, swept in to its shores, this time from the Pacific ; again, it was one man's persistence, pitted against all contemporary scorn, which proved that a 250-mile-wide column of water, equal to the flow of the Nile, Amazon, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Yellow and Congo Rivers together multiplied several thousand times, washed the Pacific coast of the United States.
    Here, at my fingertips, lay the possibility of a discovery as great as either of these, if not greater. The whole of the world's whaling industry would be affected by knowledge of my current. That, I argued with myself, could bring conservation on a global scale of the disappearing schools of whales in the Southern Ocean, even if Upton killed off a few hundred in pinning down that knowledge for me.
    There was, too, a vital military aspect of The Albatross'
    Foot. In H.M.S. Scott I had sunk a U-boat deep in the Southern Ocean toward the ice. She had surfaced before she sank, and I recovered her log. For submarines, knowledge of water temperature and salinity is vital. I had been surprised at the data the log had shown of the area where I now knew The Albatross' Foot must be: it was a picture of
    current and counter-current, of rapid temperature changes in the boundary layer between surface water and the main body of the sea itself, which we oceanographers call the " thermoc-line ". A study of the waters round Bouvet