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South Latitude
A personal record written during expedition work carried out aboard the Royal Research Ship "Discovery II", and amongst the whalers on South Georgia; all under the supervision of the "Discovery" Committee on behalf of the Government of the Falkland Islands.
- GenresTravelNonfiction
328 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1938
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February 4, 2015
In 1929, the author, a lecturer in zoology at the East London College (later renamed Queen Mary College), decided that he needed a change. So he applied for a position as a scientist, to study whales (carcasses), on the “Discovery” expedition, and was promptly given a berth on the ‘Antarctic’, a Norwegian factory ship sailing out of Barry Docks (Cardiff, South Wales), to South Georgia (in the Southern Ocean).
This book is his fascinating and beautifully written account from that day to (I estimate) mid 1936. His descriptions of the commercial whale industry in both South Georgia and Durban are remarkably precise, detailed, vivid, and are not for the squeamish reader. The raw humour of the workers acts as a stark reminder to us today as to just how easy our lives are by comparison. However there were some ‘civilising’ influences: each whaling station on South Georgia had its own cinema, which showed films twice weekly!
In books describing rationing in England during WW2, I’ve read how whale meat was offered, off ration, to the general population; who appear to have universally detested it. Yet Ommanney (on pg 39) says that well hung (‘till black) whale meat, properly cooked, is like tender beefsteak, and is utterly delicious. However he does carry on to observe the incompetence of their English cook who succeeded in turning this potential delicacy into either “leather or cinders.”
I thought that the author might have given more of his text over to describing his research work; but although he does mention this in several places (and devotes chapter 12 to the subject), he knows how to enchant his non-scientific readers. The description of a magnificent Zulu man (one of the head flensers) who routinely offered worms and intestinal parasites to the zoologists is warmly amusing.
1931 finds Ommanney on Deception Island, where the whaling station has been abandoned. He is there to study the penguins, and is none too complimentary about the smell of their guano (a quality not mentioned by David Attenbororough and his BBC film crews today). There follows a quite enchanting description of courtship between two penguins. But with a turn of the page the weather turns, and one is reminded just how quickly a beautiful environment can turn into one of deadly hostility.
Ommanney spends the southern summer of 1932-33 surveying the ocean around the Falkland Islands and into the Weddell Sea, where his expert descriptions of the ocean currents in the formation of pack ice, and ‘hummocky’ ice, starkly act as a vital reminder that both expert knowledge and detailed observation was crucial in the avoidance of a steel-hulled vessel straying into deadly danger.
Chapter 14 takes the reader to Christmas 1935, where the ‘Discovery II’ is moored in the harbour of Williamstown, (Melbourne) Victoria, Australia. News comes through that Lincoln Ellsworth, the American aviator, and his ‘plane have vanished during an attempt to fly 2,000 miles from Dundee Island (Graham Land), across the Antarctic Continent, to “Little America”, at the Southern extremity of the Ross Sea. The crew of the Discovery II take aboard Flt. Lt. Eric Douglas RAAF, a Gipsy Moth scout aeroplane, and a Westland Wapiti bomber, and set off to search for Ellsworth.
It is at this point that the reader feels the hand of history in the author’s mention of the highly distinguished Polar explorer and geologist, Sir Douglas Mawson, who (thankfully, as it turned out) in 1912 had declined Robert Scott’s invitation to join that ill-fated expedition to the Pole. Herein lies the truth of the awe inspiring reminder that mention by a contemporary has a truth and immediacy that no later biographer can even begin to adequately approach..
The final quarter or so of the book describes an event of extraordinary survival that I suspect no reader would realistically ever want to share in real life. I shall not describe this section in any detail because Ommanney, who was there, grippingly describes it so very, very, much better that I, living decades later, could ever possibly even begin to attempt to. Suffice to say that readers of an anthropomorphic persuasion may prefer not to read this last section.
On finishing the book, I sat and quietly marvelled at the technological advances which today make Polar travel so very considerably safer than it once was.
That is why this book demands to be read more widely.
This book is his fascinating and beautifully written account from that day to (I estimate) mid 1936. His descriptions of the commercial whale industry in both South Georgia and Durban are remarkably precise, detailed, vivid, and are not for the squeamish reader. The raw humour of the workers acts as a stark reminder to us today as to just how easy our lives are by comparison. However there were some ‘civilising’ influences: each whaling station on South Georgia had its own cinema, which showed films twice weekly!
In books describing rationing in England during WW2, I’ve read how whale meat was offered, off ration, to the general population; who appear to have universally detested it. Yet Ommanney (on pg 39) says that well hung (‘till black) whale meat, properly cooked, is like tender beefsteak, and is utterly delicious. However he does carry on to observe the incompetence of their English cook who succeeded in turning this potential delicacy into either “leather or cinders.”
I thought that the author might have given more of his text over to describing his research work; but although he does mention this in several places (and devotes chapter 12 to the subject), he knows how to enchant his non-scientific readers. The description of a magnificent Zulu man (one of the head flensers) who routinely offered worms and intestinal parasites to the zoologists is warmly amusing.
1931 finds Ommanney on Deception Island, where the whaling station has been abandoned. He is there to study the penguins, and is none too complimentary about the smell of their guano (a quality not mentioned by David Attenbororough and his BBC film crews today). There follows a quite enchanting description of courtship between two penguins. But with a turn of the page the weather turns, and one is reminded just how quickly a beautiful environment can turn into one of deadly hostility.
Ommanney spends the southern summer of 1932-33 surveying the ocean around the Falkland Islands and into the Weddell Sea, where his expert descriptions of the ocean currents in the formation of pack ice, and ‘hummocky’ ice, starkly act as a vital reminder that both expert knowledge and detailed observation was crucial in the avoidance of a steel-hulled vessel straying into deadly danger.
Chapter 14 takes the reader to Christmas 1935, where the ‘Discovery II’ is moored in the harbour of Williamstown, (Melbourne) Victoria, Australia. News comes through that Lincoln Ellsworth, the American aviator, and his ‘plane have vanished during an attempt to fly 2,000 miles from Dundee Island (Graham Land), across the Antarctic Continent, to “Little America”, at the Southern extremity of the Ross Sea. The crew of the Discovery II take aboard Flt. Lt. Eric Douglas RAAF, a Gipsy Moth scout aeroplane, and a Westland Wapiti bomber, and set off to search for Ellsworth.
It is at this point that the reader feels the hand of history in the author’s mention of the highly distinguished Polar explorer and geologist, Sir Douglas Mawson, who (thankfully, as it turned out) in 1912 had declined Robert Scott’s invitation to join that ill-fated expedition to the Pole. Herein lies the truth of the awe inspiring reminder that mention by a contemporary has a truth and immediacy that no later biographer can even begin to adequately approach..
The final quarter or so of the book describes an event of extraordinary survival that I suspect no reader would realistically ever want to share in real life. I shall not describe this section in any detail because Ommanney, who was there, grippingly describes it so very, very, much better that I, living decades later, could ever possibly even begin to attempt to. Suffice to say that readers of an anthropomorphic persuasion may prefer not to read this last section.
On finishing the book, I sat and quietly marvelled at the technological advances which today make Polar travel so very considerably safer than it once was.
That is why this book demands to be read more widely.
December 27, 2015
Favorite line:
Aboard her there were pleasant cheerful people whom we knew well, young men being tough in the Antarctic for the fun of it. When you stepped aboard her untidy decks you felt that for you also the Antarctic was perhaps just an adventure an that all your earliest dreams also had been filled with these fields of ice and these snow covered mountains. However, as I stood on that beach feeling not at all tough and not finding the Antarctic any fun at all, I wondered how one could so deceive oneself
~ F. D. Ommanney, South Latitude p. 291
Aboard her there were pleasant cheerful people whom we knew well, young men being tough in the Antarctic for the fun of it. When you stepped aboard her untidy decks you felt that for you also the Antarctic was perhaps just an adventure an that all your earliest dreams also had been filled with these fields of ice and these snow covered mountains. However, as I stood on that beach feeling not at all tough and not finding the Antarctic any fun at all, I wondered how one could so deceive oneself
~ F. D. Ommanney, South Latitude p. 291
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews