Documentary : Icy Encounter With Past Rekindles Pioneer Spirit : Tourist ship carries a cargo of memories for a modern-day Antarctic explorer who came back alive.

In this frigid wilderness where snow falls in summer, the rusting bow of a nameless ship juts from a watery grave. Buckled steel plating and broken cables suggest that the vessel was slowly crushed by ice.

Thousands of miles from the nearest port, this mysterious wreck was most likely a whaler’s factory ship whose crew moored it, then left for the inactive winter season.

Perhaps they never returned, victims of the Great Depression’s economic storms. Perhaps they returned too late.

Ice is nature’s enforcer in the Antarctic, an unstoppable force that out-muscles those who would defy it. The ship at Foyn Bay had tried and lost, and it was not the first.

When the British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton boldly set off to cross the continent in 1914, his ship Endurance--especially designed for polar travel--was splintered by pack ice and sank before he even got ashore.

“Shackleton was my inspiration as a boy,” said Wally Herbert, 58, a seasoned polar adventurer aboard the M S Explorer, a double-hulled ship carrying 57 eco-tourists and a trio of polar experts to Foyn Bay and other Antarctic destinations.

In the 1950s, Herbert mapped 40,000 square miles of the Antarctic Peninsula using dog sleds and skis. He never made it to the South Pole, so he decided instead to seek fame in the north. In 1969, he drove a dog sled 3,800 miles over the Arctic ice pack, returning from the North Pole just as Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon.

“The desire for fame is necessary as an incentive (to explore). It gets the adrenaline going,” said Herbert, reflecting on the coincidental timing that robbed him of fame that might have been his.

Herbert’s current explorations are largely spiritual--he’s a writer and painter. His silence and extraordinary accomplishments initially intimidated me, but like the others aboard the Explorer I discovered he was easy to talk to.

In Antarctica, though, human silence often seems most appropriate. Blue glaciers calve with the sound of low thunder. Comic penguins in colonies of thousands call out in cacophony. Even the sound of the wind is part of the Antarctic experience.

Late one day, when the howling winds of a sudden storm began to buffet the ship, I clambered quickly to the upper deck. A closet Indiana Jones with a vivid imagination, I was transformed into a great Antarctic adventurer.

The thought of Wally Herbert brought me back to reality.

As one spectacular day merged into the next--it was light around the clock--I grew to appreciate the almost spiritual reverence he had for Antarctica and the bravery of its early explorers, especially Shackleton.

After his ship sank, Shackleton and his men spent five months as desperate castaways on drifting ice floes, escaping into lifeboats when the ice eventually broke up under their feet.

Cold and wet, they managed to make landfall on desolate Elephant Island. From there Shackleton and five others sailed the 20-foot James Caird on an epic 800-mile journey to seek help from whalers on South Georgia Island, a remote fleck in the vast and stormy South Atlantic.

Three months later and on his fourth attempt, Shackleton made it back through the ice to Elephant Island in the steamer Yelcho, rescuing his entire crew.

“Shackleton was right at the leading edge of a new breed of polar explorers. He never expected anybody to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He led by example,” Herbert said.

Determined to become a world-famous explorer like his boyhood idol, Herbert signed on with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, the forerunner of today’s British Antarctic Survey. Driven by a sense of history, he headed south. He was 23.

Thirty-four winters had passed and Herbert, his beard now gray, was revisiting the continent of his youth. I was excited to accompany him.

Enchanted by Antarctica’s stunning beauty and intrigued by Herbert’s shipboard yarns, I felt the journey was something like a trip back in time.

As the Explorer’s bearded captain nursed the red ship through the icy Gerlache Strait, the word went out that we were heading for “Wally’s hut”--if it still stood.

Built in 1957 from packing crates by the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, this 8-foot-by-12-foot tar paper shack had been the agreed terminus of a one-year mapping expedition by Herbert and several companions. He and six others arrived safely and on time. The relief ship didn’t show.

Running low on food, the men lashed empty oil drums to their sleds to fashion a makeshift raft and used snow shovels to paddle out to distant ice floes on hunting expeditions. They sought fatty, calorie-rich seals; those they could catch they clubbed to death for lack of a rifle.

The relief ship eventually arrived, three months late. It had hit an iceberg.

“People think that if you just have enough courage you can get from point A to point B. It’s just not so,” Herbert said. Careful planning and luck also play a role.

From the Explorer’s bridge, the floating ice looked something like a giant, monochrome jigsaw puzzle; no edge pieces and all white. Suddenly Wally’s hut came into view on shore, a tiny peaked shack, black against the snow.

The wind and ice of 34 winters had ripped off half the tar paper siding, but rusting steel cables still held the structure to its foundation.

Through binoculars, the scene reminded me of a grainy black-and-white newsreel that might have chronicled Wally Herbert’s early exploits. All that was missing was a baritone anchorman proclaiming: “Polar Explorer Returns to Bottom of Earth!”

We went ashore in Zodiac rafts.

As if frozen in time, the hut’s interior was unchanged from the day Herbert had left, a silent time capsule whose door was shut in 1958 with nothing more than a piece of twine.

Magazine pinup girls--modest by today’s standards--smiled from the walls. A teapot sat on a countertop, silent for decades. A yellowed, 1956 issue of the Motor Magazine advertised the latest cars, many now classics.

“It’s good to be home,” Herbert said.

I lingered in the hut, listening to Herbert recall his glorious youth, the past and present fusing into one.

Unlike the crushed hull of the abandoned whaling ship, the hut had survived intact. Both had a story to tell, but only one had a storyteller. The other was left to imagination.