Part III: Antarctica and Academe - Scott Polar Research Institute

We passed the Polish base Arctowski at Point Thomas and went on into Ezcurra
Inlet which was still filled with fast-ice, on which were hundreds of crabeater seals,
basking in the sun, with one leopard and one Weddell near the edge. There were
also some seals well back from the ice edge, near a glacier front tide-crack. It was a
superb afternoon, warm and sunny, we were surrounded by blue and white glaciers
and craggy peaks. Terns were crying as they swooped over the rocks.
An experiment was planned, to translocate crabeater triads to the shoreward
extent of the fast ice, and keeping them under observation to establish whether
wandering males would be attracted. We offloaded the tents and stores and sledged
them to land across the fast ice. Ian and Doug set up the camp - two tents and a
snow igloo constructed to hold the stores.
Meanwhile Don and Dick bagged and tagged crabeater seals and Torger, John
and myself collected four seals for scientific purposes - which I shot because Torger
didn't want to, - nor did I for that matter. These hundreds of crabeaters were almost
all immatures, feeding on krill (determined from their pink faeces because the
stomachs of those we shot were all empty). The majority were about 75 inches long -
a very standard group of yearlings. One 93 inch female shot was probably mature,
although there was no obvious corpus albicans in the ovaries, there was an engorged
uterus and large mammary glands with brown watery secretion, colostrum-like.
One horn of the uterus had reddish mucosa, which Torger said was a placental scar
1-2 years old. I thought it had more likely aborted a foetus two or more months ago.
We worked in shirt sleeves in warm sunshine, the weather was so pleasant.
Meanwhile the ship had left to land Wayne and Nick who were invited to stay
with the Poles. All their food and equipment was offloaded and later the ‘Hero’
returned to tie up alongside the ice edge. We were invited to a party at Arktowski,
but later discovered that the Poles' time-keeping’ was an hour behind everyone else
so we had to wait until 8 o’clock our time. They sent an amphibious vehicle to collect
us, which was old and very noisy and smelly. It took us around the point - the
silence and beautiful landscape colours and reflections contrasting with the infernal
machine - and drove ashore to land us just outside the front door of the base, which
looked like an agglomeration of 'Portakabins' and was very comfortable inside.
There we were plied with vodka, brandy and beer as well as some cold meats and
salad. Captain Lenie, Don and myself were taken off to his office by the Base
Commander, Dr. Jersac and the English-speaking Dr. Dutkiewicz. Jersac was a
Quaternary geologist, Dutkeiwicz a geographer interested in soil processes,
solifluction and so on. Other scientists were studying fish, krill, marine
microbiology, hydrology and there were five glaciologists.
We had a pleasant evening talking shop while the other party got more noisy.
Then we returned to the ship in our noisy transport at midnight, getting wet from the
spray on the way. It was a clear, starry night with the Southern Cross and Orion
particularly bright. Later Ian got some good underwater sounds from the fast ice of
all three species of seals.
Next morning it was bleak and overcast. It was also windy and so there were few
seals hauled out. We had some discussion of future plans and decided to take no
more than 50 crabeaters from the fast ice as they were nearly all immature and would
therefore give a biased estimate of the age at sexual maturity. Instead we decided to
take most of our specimens from the pack ice - 15 cows and pups from family groups
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