Godspeed, with hope and urgency
The Erebus Chalice has begun its journey to Antarctica. After looking after it over winter, Christ Church Cathedral gave it to Tony German from the National Science Foundation, at a service in Christchurch on Sunday. The silver and gilt chalice will now travel to Chapel of the Snows at McMurdo Station for the summer, a tradition that has continued for 35 years. Rev Hugh Bowron, Acting Dean, remembered those who have given their lives for exploration and science, and asked for God’s blessing on everyone heading south: “May all that takes place in Antarctica this year and the time to come respect the beauty, the mystery and fragility of God's creation. Make us, we pray, good stewards of the earth and sea, and good neighbours gathered from several nations.”
Antarctic scientist, Prof Tim Naish, took to the pulpit to give an address about climate change. The Antarctic ice sheets are melting, which could put nearly a billion people at risk from coastal flooding as seas rise. There is urgency to reduce the carbon emissions which are heating the planet. His was also a message of hope: There is time to avert suffering, if we act now.
The exact origins of the Erebus Chalice are a mystery, according to short history provided to service-goers. It was given, in 1987 by Miss Betty Bird to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Robert Falcon Scott’s visit and death at the South Pole in 1912. There is legend, untrue, that the chalice accompanied Miss Bird’s great-great uncle, then Lt Joseph Bird, on Sir James Clark Ross’ 1839 expedition. Made in about 1910, is more likely that the chalice has an association with Scott’s expedition.
Antarctica New Zealand’s Megan Nicholl read In Search of a Sentinel by Alina Siegfried, which is re-printed here (thank you so many people for asking!)
In Search of a Sentinel
At Robert Scott’s Discovery Hut
seal blubber lies stagnant
In rusted frying pan
A bag of onions sits in the corner
As if the men walked out
Halfway through breakfast one day
And never did return
Up on the hill a cross stands sentinel
Across McMurdo Sound
Casting a watchful gaze
Over the endeavours of our time
The day I step inside,
It is one hundred years old
I half expect to see Sleeping Beauty
emerging from the semi-darkness
Waking after all this time to find the world much changed
But all is quiet on the point
At Robert Scott’s Terra Nova Hut
The bones of a husky lie
In a windswept, ephemeral grave
To the bitter end, still chained
The bones remain
Ever faithful
Ever watchful
Standing sentinel
To the Sleeping Beauty inside
sprawled out across a desk, she lies,
An Emperor Penguin, her frozen kingdom
Oblivious to the slipping by of time
In Shackelton’s Expedition Hut
12,000 Adelie Penguins stand by
Inside, abundant provisions
In frigid opulence
Huntley & Palmers crackers, Coleman’s mustard
Whiskey beneath the floorboards
Laundry still on the lines
And if you look close enough
You can make out Shackleton’s signature
Scrawled across a packing crate
It has been 17 years since I stepped inside,
A teenage lifetime ago
And I wonder, does the husky still stand sentinel
Does Sleeping Beauty yet slumber?
In the shadow of Erebus upon Pegasus airfield,
This humble watchwoman-in-waiting
stepped out to find herself
Blasted with the overwhelming reality
Of vastness, 360 degrees
With that single step,
a seed of passion, thoroughly planted
A challenge laid to do my part
My gift is my story
So how does this one contend
With a continent that is full of them?
Who are the ones who will watch over the ice
As the world about us rapidly changes?
Look to the South in search of a sentinel
For it is the climate scientist,
Who reveals a new story
From every inch of ice core
It is the hydrologist monitoring the meltwater
Beneath the Helliwell Hills
It is the soil expert, treading lightly
Across the fragile Dry Valley floors
Meticulously careful not to leave
A single footprint in perpetuity
It is the captain navigating stormy seas
As the toothfish lurks below
It is the weather watchers, the penguin counters
The pilots and the heritage experts
who see that the husky and Sleeping Beauty
Will forever stay as they lay
It is the lone figure
In quiet reflection in the chapel at McMurdo
Our Lady of the Snows
And in the chapel of nature’s grandeur
It is the photographer, lying in waiting
For the towering ice shelf to calve
Stealing and sealing in time
A single moment that has the power
to take our breath away
When I feel the icy blast of a Wellington Southerly
These bones, they remember
When I turn to face the bottom of the world
This flesh, it cannot forget
Taking me to a time and a place
Where the sun does not set,
A place where standing sentinel
In the golden lowlight of 3am
The silence is so complete
You can hear the blood coursing through your veins.