The cold as an enemy

Text 1: Ninety-Three Days in the Ice, by Henry Carrow

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

January 14th. Ninety-third day in the ice. The thermometer this morning stood at forty-six degrees below zero, and the mercury in the spare glass froze solid, so that we have now only the spirit thermometer to tell us how cold we are, as if any man aboard needed telling. The cold here is not a condition of the air. It is an enemy, patient and intelligent, that probes every seam of the ship and every gap in a man’s clothing, and finds it, and enters.

We fight it as soldiers fight a siege. The hatches are banked with snow, the lower deck is hung with canvas, the stove is fed every hour of the day and night, and still the frost grows thick upon the beams over our hammocks, and drips upon us when the stove is hot, and freezes again when it is not. Thompson, the carpenter, touched a metal rail with his bare hand on Tuesday, and left the skin of his palm upon it. Two men have lost toes. We drill, we march about the deck, we sing, because a man who sits still and grows drowsy is a man the cold has begun to win.

And yet I would be a liar if I wrote only of war. Tonight the sky over the ice was hung with the aurora, great curtains of green and rose light moving slowly as if a wind blew them, and the whole ship’s company stood on deck in silence and watched until our beards were white. Not one man complained of the cold while it lasted. I have no word for what it is to be conquered by a thing one is fighting, and to be grateful.

Text 2: It Just Doesn’t Care, by Freya Lund

An original contemporary memoir.

I spent eleven months as a field assistant at a research station on the Antarctic coast, and people always ask me the same question: how did you cope with the cold? The honest answer is that you do not cope with it, any more than you cope with gravity. You simply arrange your whole life around it.

In winter the temperature outside rarely rose above minus thirty, and the wind could make it feel like minus fifty. Going outside took twenty minutes of preparation: thermal layers, fleece, a down suit, two pairs of gloves, a balaclava, goggles, and a radio check with the base. We went in pairs, always, and we knew exactly how long we could stay out before our fingers stopped working. Nobody was brave about it. The people who got hurt in Antarctica, our station leader told us on the first night, were the ones who treated the cold as something to beat. ‘It doesn’t want anything,’ she said. ‘It isn’t trying to kill you. That’s what makes it dangerous. It just doesn’t care.’

I came to love it, in a strange way. Not the pain of a frozen cheek or the endless ritual of zips and gloves, but the clarity it forced on everything. On still nights, the air was so dry and cold that the stars did not twinkle; they simply burned. The cold made every decision serious and every warm room a gift. When I came home, ordinary English weather seemed oddly timid, like a conversation with someone who would not say what they meant.

‘Both writers present the cold as an enemy to be defeated.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the cold each writer experiences
• explain how far you agree that both writers present the cold as an enemy to be defeated
• compare the ways the writers present the cold and their responses to it.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.