TRAVELING IN STYLE : THE OLD MAN <i> And the</i> SOUTHERN SEA : A Novelist Known for Tackling Big Themes Gives Himself a Big 85th Birthday Present: a Cruise to the Mysterious Waters of Antarctica

IN THE YEARS WHEN I TRAVELED the three major oceans of the world--Pacific, Atlantic, Indian--and wrote about them, I often speculated as to how they were defined geographically. In the north I had no problem. The Indian Ocean was terminated dramatically by India itself. The Pacific ended where the Aleutian Islands cut it off, with Alaska and Siberia looming behind. And the Atlantic was defined by Greenland, Iceland and the huge islands of eastern Canada. But what happened at the southern ends of these same oceans?

Some maps adopt an easy but inaccurate solution--South Pacific Ocean, South Atlantic Ocean--as if the waters surrounding the continent of Antarctica, a continental land mass almost twice as big as either Australia or the United States, were merely a continuation of the big seas to the north. (A moment’s analysis proves that this is not the case.) Other maps ignore this vast area altogether or fumble with a name. Still others call it the Antarctic Ocean--but that restricts its significance. Happily, some modern map makers, having listened to the advice of geographers, have begun labeling it--with considerable accuracy--the Southern Ocean. This name makes good sense to me. The Southern Ocean forms a cap to the globe’s three greater oceans, but it is different from any of them--because it, alone among oceans, runs completely around the globe, circling perpetually in a clockwise motion like an icy halo about the entire continent, uninterrupted by any major land mass. These waters are unique in temperature, salinity, speed of current and mode of circulation--they are governed by their own rules.

I had long wanted to inspect this mysterious ocean, about which I had so often speculated, and had twice arranged for a visit--once when I was 60 and again at 70. In each case, medical problems and the pressures of work prevented my going. Thus when an invitation to travel through this sea as a guest lecturer on a Book-of-the-Month Club cruise coincided approximately with my 85th birthday last February, I told myself, “If you really want to see it, better get going”--and off I went.

TO VISIT THE LAND MASS OF ANTARCTICA, one flies to Christchurch in New Zealand, catches a plane to the American base at McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea and from there takes another plane to the South Pole. But to explore the Southern Ocean one must sail from the southern tip of South America. Some ships bound for the sea sail from Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan in Chile; others depart from a point much farther south, in the Argentinian portion of Tierra del Fuego--the frontier port of Ushuaia (pronounced ooo-SHY-uh ). It was here that I boarded the small Greek liner Illiria, along with 134 other passengers, a crew of about 90, six naturalists--experts on birds, whales, fish and oceans--and a fabulously good chef. It was to be a two-week cruise, two days south through turbulent Drake Passage, 10 days in the Southern Ocean itself and two days back through the Drake.

Some of us were seasick in the passage, which Sir Francis Drake discovered in 1578 while circumnavigating the globe (though he wasn’t yet Sir Francis.) Late in the second day of our crossing, the ship offered a prize to the passenger who could come closest to guessing the exact minute at which we would leave the Drake and cross into the Southern Ocean.

“How will we know when we do?” somebody wondered.

“It’s almost a precise line in the water, shifting here and there, but detectable,” replied one of our experts.

“What’s it called?” I asked, and the expert said: “Like many things down here, a problem with names. Some call it ‘The Antarctic Polar Front.’ We call it something more precise, ‘The Antarctic Convergence,’ the line at which everything changes between the big oceans to the north and our smaller ocean down here.”

“How do we spot it?”

“Several ways. The Southern Ocean is more saline. It’s colder. Its current is remorseless, always swift, always west to east. It also contains more edible sea life than the Drake. And if you could drop about 15,000 feet below the surface, you’d find the water extremely cold and moving north.”

I failed to notice any of the signals myself, except the most important one: When we finally left the Drake, the turbulence subsided. Wave crests dropped, a cold serenity graved the ocean, and off to the west came an unforgettable sight: Many months ago, from the face of a glacier far to the south, a tremendous iceberg had broken loose. It was now drifting idly northeast in the sunlight of late summer. It was gigantic, much bigger than I could have anticipated, perhaps as big as all the buildings in a rural village. “And,” said the scientist at my elbow, “we see only the part above water. Eighty percent of that monster is below the surface.”

It was the first of nearly 1,000 icebergs we would see before we were done. Some, of course, were small, but they were always handsome in their varied colors: snow white, translucent crystal, green, pale blue--and sometimes, when the sun struck properly, a soft glowing gold. But whatever their color, their forms were mesmerizing: castles, barns, great flattop areas that could be used as landing space for aircraft, towers, turrets--and, believe it or not, two enormous hollowed-out glaciers in the form of gigantic stadiums that could seat thousands.

BUT OUR REAL DELIGHT was the abundance of living creatures in and around the Southern Ocean. One afternoon, a group of humpback whales surfaced a few feet from one of our Zodiacs--the rubber dinghies we used when leaving the ship to explore--and there they played to amuse us. Seals abounded. Did we see penguins? Not the tall emperors who appear so majestic in photographs; they live much farther south than we could go. But of the smaller breeds, including chin-straps and gentoos, we saw hundreds of thousands; we saw whole islands covered with them, protecting their newly hatched young, every bird with its tuxedo and its waddling stride.

On one island, a dozen feet away from me, a mother gentoo penguin fed her chick--which had already grown nearly to the mother’s size. The chick stuck its open beak high in the air, wailing until its mother jammed her own long beak down the babe’s throat and regurgitated fish morsels that she had nearly digested. I was so delighted with this display of motherly love that I wanted others to witness it, so I waved my arm to summon them--but this frightened the penguins, and before my friends could come, they had waddled off.

“See!” one of the experts rebuked me. “Even a sudden gesture frightens them, drives them away.” But as he spoke my friends began to laugh, and when I turned I saw that the mother and chick had come back to stand not six feet away. They wanted to inspect me with the same curiosity that I had shown in staring at them. And there the three of us stayed, face to face for a good 15 minutes.

The ice that covers Antarctica completely is more than a mile high in most places and even higher than that at others. This ice sinks the entire continent far below normal sea level, and contains more than 80% of the world’s total supply of fresh water. Should the ice ever melt, the oceans of the world would rise hundreds of feet, inundating most low-lying shore lands.

My main interest, though, lay not with the land mass but with the captivating ocean surrounding it, whose mysteries continued to amaze. For example, I learned that its deepest waters were extremely cold, perhaps the coldest in the world. They cling together as an indestructible unit and move not west to east like the rest of the ocean, but south to north, almost crawling along. Retaining their integrity and their temperature for thousands of miles, they creep as far north as the Caribbean and even the Mediterranean.

Even more surprising, the waters of the Southern Ocean have become one of the Earth’s principal suppliers of food. The chain is this: Microscopic nutrients abound in this water, rich in number and variety. These provide food for plankton, small animal and plant organisms that drift through the water, often near the surface. These are gobbled up in turn by tremendous congregations of krill, shrimp-like little swimmers about 2 1/2 inches long, which are themselves consumed in huge quantities by whales.

Krill breed with such prodigious vigor that the world population of this tiny creature has been calculated to be six followed by 14 zeros--600,000,000,000,000, or six hundred thousand billion. If you weighed all the krill in our oceans, they’d be heavier than our entire human population.

“If a krill looks like a shrimp, swims like a shrimp, and smells like a shrimp,” I asked one of the experts, “why can’t we eat him?”

“We can!” he replied. “Japanese fishing fleets, and Russian too, harvest krill the way we harvest herring. And their cooks have learned to produce delicious meals with it.”

“Why can’t ours?”

“The Japanese and Russians find the krill delicious and nutritious. Our tastes haven’t caught up yet. But when our supply of protein begins to diminish, we’ll find we have a real liking for krill.”

AN EXCURSION INTO the Southern Ocean is not for everyone. Our group landed on eight different beaches in all, sometimes making two landings a day. Every time we did, we had to climb down our ship’s gangway, jump into small rubber boats, make our way to where we were to land, clamber ashore, wander about a barren landscape inspecting the wildlife, then reverse the process, climbing back into the boats, returning to our ship and taking the gangway up to our floating home.

This was tiring enough work itself, but I found the constant dressing and undressing even more exhausting. Let’s count the pieces of clothing you require for a land exploration in the south polar regions: First you pull three woolen socks on each foot: six. Two pairs of underpants and two pairs of trousers, the last waterproofed. Ten. Two thin undershirts, two heavy-fabric shirts. Fourteen. A heavy sweater and a scarf about the throat. Sixteen. A very heavy outer coat topped by a big parka. Eighteen. Three caps, one close fitting and two attached hoods. Twenty-one. A pair of heavy gloves and, over everything, a huge life jacket. That’s 24 items already--but the most important apparel is still to come: a pair of very thick, knee-length rubber boots.

But don’t let me scare you away from visiting the Southern Ocean. I figured that at 85, I’d be the oldest adventurer in my group--but the first person I met aboard the ship was a woman seven years older than I, and my Zodiac was crewed by three men, each nearly 90. They all made every shore excursion.

But I doubt that any of them could have enjoyed the exploration as much as I did, for I was visiting what was to me the last of the great oceans. Now I had sailed upon them all, and I had a sense of excitement here that rivaled my thrill when I first read of the Phoenicians sailing from Tyre to Carthage, or of Roman triremes crossing the Mediterranean for the first time; or when I first imagined myself with Columbus as he ventured into unknown waters, or with James Cook, the young man from nowhere who wandered into the Pacific discovering the islands I have loved so passionately, or with Charles Lindbergh, who dared to fly over the vast Atlantic--or for that matter with Francis Drake himself as he braved these same stormy seas.

How great the oceans are, how marvelous the smaller seas they spawn. I pray that future cartographers--who will have to remap the world anyway after its recent political concussions--will finally agree unanimously to call this stupendous body of icy water by its proper designation--the Southern Ocean. It merits a name of its own.

GUIDEBOOK: On the Southern Ocean

Getting there: Southern Ocean cruises on the Illiria are booked through Travel Dynamics in New York, (800) 367-6766. The next sailings from Ushuaia are in December of this year and January of 1993 (summertime in the Southern Hemisphere), during which period there will be six departures. Fares for the 16-day cruise range from $5,400 to $8,300 per person, and include a one-night hotel stay in Buenos Aires on each end of the trip and transfers from there to Ushuaia.

American Airlines flies daily to Buenos Aires via Miami, and the Argentinian national airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, flies there via Miami Tuesdays and Thursdays, and via Mexico City and Lima on Sundays.

Other cruises to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are booked through Clipper Cruise Lines of St. Louis, (800) 325-0010; Abercrombie & Kent in Oak Brook, Ill., (800) 323-7308; Mountain Travel-Sobek in El Cerrito, Calif., (800) 227-2384; Seaquest Cruises, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., (800) 223-5688, and Ocean Cruise Lines in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., (800) 556-8850.

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