In the winter of 1897 a surgeon aboard the first research ship ever to spend a whole winter in Antarctic waters observed a worrying affliction among his crewmates. “The men were incapable of concentration, and unable to continue prolonged thought,” wrote Frederick A Cook of his time aboard the Belgica. “One sailor was forced to the verge of insanity but he recovered with the returning sun.”
Given that the darkness of a polar winter can last up to six months, this was no small problem, as a new book makes clear. Among the heroes in Icy Graves: Exploration and Death in the Antarctic are many who buckled under a strain to which few would – or could – openly admit.
The book’s author, Dr Stephen Haddelsey, has devoted a chapter to the forms of mental illness that have afflicted Antarctic explorers from the earliest expeditions to now. “One of the most exciting things to me is that we can see in the accounts of 100 years ago the first recorded instances of conditions which we now understand so much better,” he says.
Two decades after Cook made his observations, the explorer Raymond Priestley, who had accompanied both Shackleton and Scott on early expeditions, suggested polar exploration would make a fruitful field for psychological research. Though the popular image was of heroic endeavour by exceptional men, he pointed out that a “peculiar madness [had] played a major or a minor part in most expeditions”.
So began a line of research that would lead in 1984 to the identification of Seasonal Affective Disorder (Sad), a debilitating depressive condition which the NHS estimates to affect one in 15 people in the UK between September and April. In Alaska, according to one study, the incidence rises to nearly 10% of the population.
Haddelsey, a historian based at the University of Lincoln, was alerted to depressive illness among polar pioneers when researching the lives of “heroic age” explorers for a series of biographies. Subjects included his own distant cousin Frank Bickerton – a member of Douglas Mawson’s 1911 expedition – and JR Stenhouse, an unsung hero of Shackleton’s Endurance mission, who spent 10 months adrift in pack ice as commander of the support vessel Aurora.
Stenhouse, a highly decorated hero of the first world war, went on to develop such a severe case of what would now be identified as post-traumatic stress disorder that he was dismissed from the command of a scientific expedition aboard Scott’s old ship the Discovery in 1927. He had noted his own symptoms in a diary entry 15 years earlier: “Have been suffering from severe dose of Blues due, not to the surroundings, but the opportunity to think; I think happiness is a myth; whenever I have leisure the old, old curse comes back to me ... I think and brood over the use of anything and am worked into thinking that all is chaos.”
Haddelsey explains: “Mental illness in Antarctica generally falls into two categories: the first has physiological causes, the second is psychological or psycho-social.” . Sad is largely physiological, involving an accelerated production of melatonin by the pineal gland during prolonged periods of darkness. Entirely unpredictable in terms of who it will affect – and to what degree – it can be treated in some cases with a simple sun lamp. Psychological or psycho-social problems, such as Stenhouse’s appeared to be, are often linked to pre-existing conditions; they can prove dangerously disruptive in a confined community and catastrophic to the sufferer.
In 1945, Jimmy Marr, a marine zoologist in command of Operation Tabarin – a secret wartime expedition to reassert British sovereignty in Antarctica in the face of Argentine incursions – became so anxious about the technical problems involved in setting up a suitable research base that he was put on suicide watch by the expedition’s medical officer, who noted that “suicide is not unknown in such cases… he has a marked tremor, cannot sleep and worries a great deal.”
Marr was fortunate enough to be evacuated in time, unlike Arthur Farrant, a well-respected 39-year-old mechanic, who, on the evening of 17 November 1953, walked out of the Antarctic hut where he lived and worked and shot himself in the head. He had been employed to keep the generators working at a research base on remote Deception Island, as part of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey. Over months, his diligence had turned into obsessiveness as his seniors ignored his increasingly agitated requests to be transferred. He was buried in an old whalers’ graveyard on the island, which was abandoned as a research station in the 1960s.
Why bring such bleak episodes back to light? Suicides are rare during polar expeditions, Haddelsey points out, but mental illness is not, and these stories have something to tell us about humanity’s ability to cope in extreme circumstances: how to tell when something is going seriously wrong and what to do about it.
Even quaint-sounding reports of officers being better equipped to deal with the polar winter than those in the lower ranks contain nuggets of wisdom: education is important, says Haddelsey, as it gives isolated people essential resources to fight the biggest enemy: boredom. But if some findings seem obvious, others appear anomalous: recent research, for instance, has revealed that improvements in communication do not necessarily make things better. “In many cases, the ability to maintain contact with home via Skype or email is beneficial, but some find communication with distant loved ones more problematic than helpful. They expected to be isolated... and instead find themselves caught between two worlds.”
It was only in the 1950s, with the looming space age, that scientists began to make serious, sustained studies of the effects of polar life. “A lot of the studies were funded by Nasa,” says Haddelsey. “With the confined spaces, isolation, deprivation of sunlight, vegetation and sex, working on a polar base provides a good proxy for working in deep space.” As thoughts once again turn to sending manned spacecraft into deep space for voyages of many years, polar records are an invaluable cache of evidence.
And for all their troubling aspects, Haddelsey’s compelling case studies also offer consolations. After his troubles aboard the Discovery, Stenhouse recovered his equilibrium and went on to distinguish himself in the second world war. He died aged 53 in 1941 when his ship was blown up in the Red Sea. In Antarctica, where he both succeeded and failed so spectacularly, his name lives on in Stenhouse Bluff, a rock in the South Shetland Islands which has its very own glacier.
Icy Graves is published by the History Press
