Belgian Antarctic Expedition - Winter

Winter

They were poorly equipped and did not have enough winter clothing for every man on board. There was a shortage of food, and what there was lacked in variety. Penguins and seals were killed and the meat stored before the onset of winter. Warm clothing was improvised out of the materials available.

On 21 March 1898 the expedition's doctor Frederick Cook wrote:

We are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice... We have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. Time weighs heavily upon us as the darkness slowly advances.

Several weeks later, on 17 May, total darkness set in, which lasted until 23 July.

De Gerlache disliked the fresh penguin and seal meat that had been killed and stored before the onset of winter and forbade his men to eat it. Signs of scurvy began to show in a number of the men. de Gerlache and Lecointe became so ill they wrote their wills, two of the crew started to show signs of mental illness and morale in general was extremely poor. Several men lost their sanity, including one Belgian sailor who left the ship "announcing he was going back to Belgium".

Frederick Cook and the First Mate, Roald Amundsen then took command as de Gerlache and Lecointe were unable to fulfil this role due to scurvy. Vitamin C was not discovered until the 1920s but Cook was convinced that fresh meat was the cure for scurvy due to his experiences with Robert Peary in the Arctic. He retrieved the frozen penguin and seal meat and insisted that each man ate some each day. Even de Gerlache began to eat the meat and slowly the men all recovered their health.

Several months of hardship followed. Attempts to free the ship and its crew from the clutches of the ice failed. By January 1899 the Belgica was still trapped in ice about 7 feet (2.1m) thick and the possibility of another winter in the ice was becoming real. Open water was about half a mile away and Cook suggested that trenches should be cut to the open water to allow the Belgica to escape the ice. The weakened crew used dynamite and various tools to create the channel. Finally, on 15 February 1899, they managed to slowly start down the channel they had cleared during the weeks before. It took them nearly a month to cover 7 miles, and on 14 March they cleared the ice. The expedition returned to Antwerp on 5 November 1899. The conditions were hard but nevertheless the expedition still managed to collect a significant amount of scientific data including a full year of meteorological observations.