Voyage of Discovery
Like a rehabilitated Captain Ahab, Daniel Zitterbart led his scientists into the sort of supra-natural stillness only Antarctica can deliver.
I followed them in an inflatable Zodiac, cold snapping at my fingers, squinting at glossy icebergs fissured with stilton-blue veins, heading towards the spouts of vapour we could see suspended in Paradise Harbour’s frigid dawn. There she blows, as Captain Ahab would say.
Next to brash ice that glinted like rough-cut diamonds, two distant dark lines revealed themselves to be slumbering humpback whales, fat from gorging krill. Forty tonnes of rorqual, happily recovering since the 1986 ban on commercial whaling, before which they were slaughtered to near extinction by Ahab’s ilk.
There was no harpoon in Daniel’s hand, just a hi-tech $10,000 whale tag on a long carbon-fibre pole. His Zodiac manoeuvred alongside and he leaned out and slapped one of the humpbacks with the suction-cupped device (it would release after several hours).The whale started, arched and then dived, rocking the Zodiac as it went.
“It can be a little bit terrifying,” Daniel admitted later, “when these giant creatures are beneath your flimsy boat.”
Yet all went smoothly. Over the next few
