The Antarctic continent is an icy desert – the coldest, most arid place on earth. Here is no grass, no vegetation except a little lichen on the rocks by the coast in summer. Inland, only the highest mountain peaks emerge from the ice and snow. The ice cap is over 14,500 feet thick in some areas. The penguins and seals, the only wild life on the continent, are dependent on the sea for their sustenance. There have been no human inhabitants and even today, the shifting population of scientists with their support staffs are totally reliant on the outside world for supplies. Yet the Antarctic can get a hold on people as tenaciously as any mountains, ocean or desert. Men who have worked in the Antarctic return again and again, and even after settling down in their home countries with wives and families, they still yearn for that harsh, empty but incredibly beautiful land.
I am not sure whether a certain kind of personality is attracted to the Antarctic or if life in polar regions moulds the man, but a very definite type of person seems to emerge. You need a resolute, almost plodding sense of endurance to survive. Everything takes a long time. An expedition is going to take a year, perhaps longer, to complete; it is not a question of surmounting a spectacular mountain peak, but rather one of sheer survival, of just keeping alive, of plodding over endless icy wastes, carrying out a task of survey, meteorology or some other scientific aim. It may entail wintering together in one tiny hut. And so the successful polar man is a great survivor with a lot of self-control; often quiet and self-contained, immensely tenacious, a steady plodder, he is not the athletic star with whom many mountaineers could be compared.
Vivian Fuchs, who was to lead the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic expedition, summed up the difference saying: ‘I see mountaineering like a hundred yards race, where it is a quick, tremendous exertion of effort that counts; whereas the Antarctic thing I see as a cross-country race. You will always win against nature if you hold your position and then, at the right moment, press through.’
In many ways Vivian Fuchs epitomises the polar explorer. Of medium build and height, he has a compact strength, both of physique and personality. He is a singularly self-contained man who rarely shows emotion and projects an aura of complete self-control. Like Thor Heyerdahl, he sees himself not so much as an adventurer, but as a scientist whose insatiable curiosity might take him into areas of risk, but the risk of adventure is in no way an end in itself. Born in 1908, Vivian Fuchs had a classic, middle-class upbringing, going to Brighton College and then St John’s, Cambridge. At school he was reasonably good at games and fairly bright, without being brilliant academically. From an early age he had a passion for natural history, collecting butterflies, beetles, flowers and odd-shaped pieces of wood. He was also practical and built his own radio set in the very early days of radio. As an only child he had a close, warm relationship with his parents and, as a result, grew and developed in a very secure environment.
At Cambridge, Fuchs studied geology and went on his first expedition, to Arctic Greenland. This did not lead to an instant devotion to polar regions for his next opportunity arose in equatorial Africa, with another Cambridge expedition to the African lakes. At the end of this trip there were still some unanswered questions and so other opportunities arose and he spent the period before the Second World War taking part in, and leading, a series of geological expeditions in Africa, collecting a PhD on the way. He would probably have become an African expert and was already negotiating for a job with the Colonial Government of the Sudan, but the war changed all that. Commissioned, he was sent to Staff College where his administrative abilities were both noticed and undoubtedly developed. With the end of the war coincidence, as so often happens, was to lead him into the career for which he was so singularly qualified.
Antarctica was still a huge, empty continent of unknown potential. The great powers and the countries closest to it had already put in their claims and Britain, even during the war, had established a few scientific outposts on the islands off Graham Land, the peninsula that juts out from the Antarctic continent, reaching up towards the southern tip of South America. After the war the British immediately planned to widen their programme and advertised for personnel. Vivian Fuchs was one of the men who applied for a position with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey and, because of his qualifications gained in geological surveying in Africa and his administrative experience in the army, was offered the post of Director in the field of all the British bases then in Antarctica. It was decidedly not a desk job and during the next three years Fuchs journeyed many thousands of miles with dog teams, learning how to travel and live in Antarctica.
It was while on a survey trip that Fuchs first thought of making the trans-Antarctic crossing. He told me:
‘I remember the moment well. It was in a tent and we were about four or five hundred miles out from Stonington and couldn’t go any further because we were running out of food and had all that way to go back. We’d been stuck there for four days by a blizzard. We could see some mountains further on and wanted to know what their geology was. I said that there must be even more peaks beyond, but we did not know at that time what happened inside the continent. There had been very little aerial survey at that stage. I said to Adie, “The only way to do this is to make a trip all the way across the continent and then we shall know, shan’t we?” I sat down then and there, with a stub of pencil and worked out that it should be a joint effort of all the Commonwealth nations with claims in the Antarctic and that it would cost a quarter of a million. In the event, it cost three quarters.’
This was in 1948, but the idea lay dormant for a little longer. Fuchs was advised to wait – something he was very good at doing; and as Director of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey Scientific Bureau back in Britain, he remained in an excellent position to seize the right opportunity for advancing his plan.
It was not a new idea. In 1914 Ernest Shackleton had sailed into the Weddell Sea in Endurance, planning to winter on the coast before making his attempt to cross the continent the following summer. It was an almost unbelievably bold project, considering they were totally dependent on their dog teams and their own strength, that they would have to establish their own supply depots on the way to the Pole before setting out on their journey, and that they would have no form of radio communication with the outside world or their support party, coming in from the other side to lay depots up the Beardmore Glacier. Caught in the ice through the winter of 1914, Endurance drifted further and further in towards the centre of the Weddell Sea and was finally crushed. They were in a desperate predicament, hundreds of miles over ice and ocean from the nearest settlement with very little chance of anyone being able to come and look for them, since the First World War was now well underway. But for Ernest Shackleton’s extraordinary powers of leadership, the twenty-seven men under his command would almost certainly have died. They set out to save themselves, hauling two of the ship’s boats over the ice of the Weddell Sea, through the bitter cold of the winter, till the summer thaws stopped their progress. Then they drifted on an ever-decreasing ice floe through the long summer, towards the Atlantic Ocean until, at last, they could push the boats into open waters and row towards the dubious haven of Elephant Island, a bleak and rocky bump, buffeted by Atlantic storms. Had they stayed there they would have starved to death and so Shackleton, with five seaman, sailed one of the boats to the island of South Georgia, 700 miles away over some of the stormiest seas in the world. It took them sixteen days, half-starved, their clothes soaked and rotten, the boat covered in ice and filled with water for most of the time. And still it wasn’t over. Having landed on the uninhabited side of the island, they had to cross its glaciers and mountainous terrain without maps, food or any kind of climbing equipment to reach the whaling station of Stromness. Shackleton then sailed back with the rescue party to pick up the remainder of his crew. It was an extraordinary achievement, something that the modern polar explorer, with his radios, air support, modern food and equipment, would never be called upon to perform.
Vivian Fuchs’ plan was almost identical to that of Shackleton. He, too, wanted to sail into the Weddell Sea, establish a wintering base on its shore and then make his dash for the Pole, with a support party to lay down depots at the other side. The plan was the same; the available equipment was vastly different. He would have a powerful, almost unsinkable icebreaker to penetrate the Weddell Sea, aircraft to spy out a route and stock his depots, motor-driven, specially designed tractors to make the crossing. It could be argued that Shackleton’s plan, with the knowledge and equipment available at that time, was a forlorn hope, but it also held the very essence of adventure, a challenge against vast odds and unknown dangers, while that of Fuchs had an element of overkill; but then, Vivian Fuchs was not interested in adventure for its own sake. He was undoubtedly an adventurous man. He would not have chosen the course of life he had adopted had he been anything else, but he was essentially a scientist. ‘I have to have a reason for everything I do,’ he told me. His main aim in making the crossing of the Antarctic was to increase man’s knowledge of that continent; the adventurous side of the concept, which was something he most certainly enjoyed, was still secondary to the scientific.
In 1954 Vivian Fuchs had his chance. The International Geophysical Year was going to be from 1957 to 1958, when the governments of the world would be concentrating on scientific exploration and research, and would be amenable to a project which would be extremely expensive but also prestigious. Fuchs was not the only Briton who dreamed of making a trans-Antarctic crossing. Duncan Carse, the childhood hero of my generation in the guise of ‘Dick Barton – Special Agent’ (in a radio series of the late 1940s and early 1950s), had grown tired of fantasy adventure and had joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey. Now he produced a plan for an Antarctic crossing which he submitted to the Polar Committee. Vivian Fuchs also produced his, and from the position he held and with the backing he had from the establishment it was almost inevitable that his would be accepted. He then succeeded in gaining the enthusiastic support of Winston Churchill, presented his plans to the Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers in 1954, and the expedition was fully underway.
Fuchs needed a support team to come in towards the Pole from the other side and, since this was in New Zealand’s sphere of influence, a New Zealand party was the obvious choice. He had already met Sir Edmund Hillary and, as New Zealand’s most eminent adventurer, Hillary seemed best qualified for leader, even though he had no polar experience. The two men provided an interesting contrast, which was to cause a great deal of trouble as the expedition unfolded. Fuchs was primarily the scientist and brilliant bureaucrat, with the plodding patience and determination that so many polar explorers have developed; Hillary, on the other hand, regarded the South Pole as a mountain to be climbed for its own adventurous sake. He was extrovert where Fuchs was self-contained; Hillary spoke his mind, whereas Fuchs carefully chose his words. But in those early days of preparation they each got on with their own sides of the huge and complex job of organisation without coming over much into contact or conflict.
In November 1955 the advance party of the expedition set sail in the icebreaker Theron, with both Fuchs and Hillary on board. They shared a cabin, but this did not bring the two men any closer together, perhaps even accentuated an awareness of their differences in temperament and motive. Hillary remembered:
‘I was treated with an unswerving friendliness but it was made very clear that I was only an observer and I was never permitted to attend the regular meetings of his executive committee (although both of my expedition members were invited to these meetings on various occasions). I suppose I shouldn’t have resented this, but I did. I felt an outsider, not to be trusted with expedition responsibilities, and this was probably an uncomfortable foundation on which to build our association over the next couple of years.’
Most of the voyage was very relaxed, since they were little more than passengers, their only duties being to take turns in cleaning out the dogs. They played various deck games to while away the hours and maintain some level of fitness. In these games Fuchs showed another side of his character; although fifty years old and the oldest man in the party, he was furiously competitive and would always do more skipping or press-ups than anyone else on board. He was determined to win every rough game they played and was the champion arm wrestler of the voyage. He had to be leader in every respect, commanding his team by physical as well as intellectual dominance.
The object of the voyage was to establish an advance party on the permanent ice shelf of the Weddell Sea, to prepare for the main party which would set out the following year. Only one other boat had ventured into the Weddell Sea since Endurance had been trapped forty years before. Even with the power of modern engines and the help of their Auster aircraft, it was all Theron could do to penetrate the piled floes and reach the Filchner Ice Shelf. They were late in reaching their destination, barely had time to unload all the supplies on to the ice floe abutting the main ice shelf, before setting sail in a rush to avoid being trapped as Endurance had been.
The eight members of the advance party, under the leadership of Ken Blaiklock, an experienced Antarctic hand, had the task of ferrying all the supplies from the floe edge to the relative safety of the permanent ice. They had the advantage of tractors and Sno-Cats, but even these were of little use against the power of the elements. A violent storm blew up shortly after the departure of Theron, broke up the sea ice on which most of the stores were still stacked and the lot were swept out to sea.
The advance party’s hut was not yet built and they were still living in tents. The Antarctic winter was close at hand. Blaiklock kept his nerve, calmly suggesting that they return to the big crate which had contained their Sno-Cat, and which they were now using as a living shelter, to have a cup of tea and take stock. It was a very different situation from the one that had faced Shackleton some forty years before, for the nearest base – an Argentinian one – was only fifty miles away down the coast. Even though they had lost most of the fuel for their tractors, they had plenty of fresh dog teams and could undoubtedly have reached safety. But Blaiklock quickly dismissed this option. He had had the foresight to bring up to their camp a carefully balanced selection of stores which were just enough to last out the winter. True, there was no fuel for heating but there was just enough for cooking. He was determined to get the hut built and Shackleton Base established before the return of the main party.
The discomfort and the feeling of isolation experienced by Blaiklock’s party was no less acute because it was self-chosen. Several of them, particularly the ones without Antarctic experience, had difficulty in adjusting to their circumstances. Hannes La Grange, a South African meteorologist, suffered particular stress, spending long hours by the floe edge gazing out into the pack ice for a relief ship that, logically, he should have known would not be arriving until after the winter. He would shout out, ‘A ship! A ship!’ at the sight of a distant iceberg, only to be told by the others to shut up and not to be so bloody stupid! Then he took to walking out of earshot, so that he could shout out in the cold, empty spaces, ‘A ship! A ship!’ without irritating his companions.
Eventually he and the other members of the advance party overcame their troubles and settled down in their bleak environment. In talking to polar people, I gather Blaiklock ran a no-nonsense setup, where individuals were encouraged to keep a stiff upper lip, keep their emotions to themselves and sort out their own troubles. Perhaps this was the only way for a small group to survive, living on top of each other in fair discomfort over a long period of time.
It took them most of the winter to build the hut. It was prefabricated into hundreds of pieces that bolted together. Unfortunately, however, laid out on the uneven surface of the ice with the snow constantly drifting in, few of the bolt holes could be lined up together. As a result, assembling the hut was a painfully slow process which occupied the entire winter, with the men working in temperatures which went down to –50 °C and having constantly to dig out the wind-driven snows. They had no fuel for heat, slept in their tents and used the Sno-Cat crate, which was also unheated, as a kitchen and living room.
And yet, at the end of the winter, when the main party returned in the icebreaker Magga Dan their spirits were high, for the hut was built, their initial fears overcome, the small group welded into a tight team. Fuchs, with George Lowe, an easy-going New Zealander who had been a member of the 1953 Everest expedition and was now official photographer for the venture, flew into Shackleton Base in advance of the boat to bring in their mail and a few luxury items. The advance team had made a special feast for their visitors, enormous cakes, home-made biscuits and sugared dough cakes, all cooked on an oil drum stove. Magga Dan arrived the following day and the stores were unloaded in the next few weeks. At the same time, on the other side of the continent, Ed Hillary was establishing Scott Base on the Ross Sea, whence he was going to lay out his line of depots for the traversing party.
The pattern of polar exploration is so very much more deliberate than that of mountaineering. You arrive one summer, build a base or camp in which to survive through the winter and be poised at the beginning of the following summer to carry out an adventure or do scientific work. Antarctic bases very quickly resemble one another, each with a big living hut containing workshops and laboratories, and a work shed for the vehicles nearby. The Antarctic explorer has to be a thoroughly practical man, able to set his hand to building, vehicle maintenance, sewing and taking his turn at mass catering, in this instance for sixteen hungry men. There is also a tradition of structured work and routine, established partly by the scientific disciplines that have always dominated polar adventure and partly by the fact that everyone taking part in the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey had been doing it as a job of work, admittedly a highly vocational one, but nonetheless one for which they were being paid.
This was a difference in approach that George Lowe noticed particularly. Used to the free and easy ways of a mountaineering expedition, he began to see the difference that winter in Shackleton Base. They had a record player in the communal living room, but the rule was that this could only be played on Saturday nights and Sundays, the argument being that it would disturb people who were working and that not necessarily everyone would want to have music – or like the music that had been chosen. It was a logical rule, but it was also a fact that Fuchs was not particularly musical, considering the music as an ‘infernal din’, and that the decision had been reached by Fuchs without any kind of consultation with the others. This was undoubtedly his style of leadership. A self-contained man, who knew exactly what he wanted, he governed every feature of the expedition with a firm hand. It had to be done his way. He did not encourage any kind of discussion, even casual, of expedition matters. George Lowe described one incident that brought this out.
‘One day, a group of three or four were listening with interest while Geoff Pratt held forth on the subject of the gloves he wore. “These things are no bloody good,” said Geoffrey. “I wouldn’t mind betting that I could design a far more efficient glove for conditions like ours.” Bunny [Fuchs] glanced up sharply from his book, took off his glasses, laid them on the open pages and spoke, “When you know a good deal more about Antarctic conditions,” he said quietly, “you’ll also know more about gloves. These gloves have been designed after years of experience – and I think you’ll find they will do the job they were intended for.”’
On the other side of the continent, Ed Hillary had no such inhibitions. He knew very little about the Antarctic, had very few preconceived notions and therefore had looked at each piece of equipment with fresh eyes. He foresaw the problems that the prefabricated huts could present and completely redesigned the ones he was going to use, having them made in very much larger sections that could be more easily bolted together. He was also flexible on the question of clothing, bringing to bear the experience he had gained climbing in the Himalaya. Fuchs distrusted down gear, feeling that the down would get wet, then freeze and lose all its insulating properties. Hillary, on the other hand, went for down suits and jackets, since they had worked so well on Everest.
Although Fuchs’ rule was autocratic, he had the personality to gain acceptance. The morale of the group was high because they felt that the venture was worthwhile and that, under Fuchs’ command, they had a very good chance of success. He was totally competent, consistent and quietly determined; also, equally important, his team were accustomed to this kind of discipline and were, in Lowe’s view, very much more amenable than a group of mountaineers would have been.
The period before the arrival of winter had been spent in organising both the Shackleton Base and establishing their forward depot, to be known as South Ice; it was on the Antarctic plateau, about 300 miles south of Shackleton and 500 miles from the Pole. This was done entirely by air, using the single-engine Otter, to make both their initial reconnaissance and then to ferry in the parts of the prefabricated hut. Three members of the team, led by Ken Blaiklock, whose appetite for lonely outposts was in no way diminished by his experience of the previous year, were to stay there through the winter, to carry out a scientific programme.
Winter and summer in Antarctica are merely relative terms. Summer means continuous glaring light, cold, snow and wind. Winter is continuous, unrelenting dark, even greater cold, with yet more winds and snow. Fuchs and his party sat out the winter, filling their time with scientific research and the preparations for their long journey next year. The vehicles were overhauled, modified and improved in a large engine shed which was even heated. The huts, partly buried in drifting snow, had an ugly, impermanent look, as if they did not belong to this pure, bleak, empty world, having a radio that was sufficiently powerful to reach England, with an arrangement to link in with the telephone network. This meant that they could call anyone in Britain for a modest ten shillings and six pence a minute. It was a strange mixture of the traditional and the new – on the one hand the huge, empty continent, a hut which was very similar in design to the ones built by Captain Scott or Shackleton at the beginning of the century, a diet that was very similar to the one that the early explorers had had, even a rhythm of life that was not so very different, and yet combined with this were the aircraft, the big powerful Sno-Cats, wireless communication that could reach anywhere in the world and the knowledge that there were other, similar bases littered over the continent, even at the Pole itself.
The sun nudged over the northern horizon towards the end of August, a sign that they would soon have to start moving, but although it crept higher each day, there were few other signs of a let-up in the winter. The temperature dropped to –50 °C and there were winds of up to sixty-three miles per hour. Fuchs had prepared an ambitious programme of reconnaissance, aerial exploration and survey work in the area before the departure of the main party on the traverse, but this very soon had to be modified. Most important was the reconnaissance on the ground of the terrain between Shackleton and South Ice.
It was 8 October before Fuchs, with deputy leader David Stratton and his two engineers, David Pratt and Roy Homard, set out with four vehicles to make the reconnaissance. They had three types of vehicle on the expedition, the largest and most sophisticated of them, the Sno-Cat, rode on four-tracked pontoons; then there was the Weasel, an oblong box on two tracks, and finally some modified tractors. One of the Weasels, driven by Homard, broke down within eight miles of Shackleton Base and, although they made a temporary repair, there was no question of taking the vehicle all the way. Roy Homard drove it back to Base, leaving the others to press on.
It was discouraging, nerve-wracking work as they edged their way over the crevassed ice shelf. Walking across a crevassed region is bad enough, but cooped in the cabin of a vehicle it must have been much worse, with the ever-present thought of hurtling downwards into the black pit of a crevasse, trapped in the cockpit. Roped together, it needed precise driving to ensure that there was enough slack cable to allow the front vehicle to surge forward if it started to go into a hidden chasm (and thus, perhaps, manage to bridge it), and yet not so much slack that it could fall into the crevasse and become irretrievably jammed or perhaps even break the rope. The cabins of the vehicles were unheated, for Fuchs believed that the interior should be a similar temperature to the outside to avoid the driver becoming cocooned from the environment, but it meant being perpetually cold, encumbered in furs or down clothing at all times. Some days they made little more than two or three miles’ progress, spending most of the time hauling vehicles out of crevasses or backtracking to find a better way round a particularly bad area. Time was now slipping by. They had set out a week late anyway, and were now badly over time. It took them thirty-seven days to reach South Ice; they had lost one vehicle and were forced to abandon another temporarily.
Back at Shackleton Base, the morale of the team had reached a low ebb. In the absence of the two most experienced engineers, they were badly behind in their maintenance programme and several of the vehicles were still buried in the snow. Several members of the crossing team had never even camped on Antarctic ice before; there was a feeling of unpreparedness and even of a haunting failure, not eased by the constant barrage of queries over the radio from the world’s press, asking when they were going to start, or for news of Hillary’s progress on the other side of the continent.
With three modified Ferguson farm tractors and a Weasel loaned by the American polar station, Hillary’s party had climbed the Skelton Glacier, the major obstacle barring their way to the polar plateau, and had established their second depot for Fuchs’ polar crossing. Viewing the efforts of the two parties, there seems a dynamic energy about everything that the New Zealand support party did, while the main party seems to have had a slow, cumbersome quality about its approach and progress. The difference was noticeable from the very start. While it took most of the energies of the main party just to erect their complex jigsaw of pre-assembled huts, Hillary’s simplified structures left his team with the time and the energy to start their reconnaissance programme before the arrival of winter. He wasted no time in getting his dog teams out to find a way up on to the Antarctic plateau, first they looked at the Ferrar Glacier, but the lower part was too badly broken up by crevasses and ice towers, so they turned their attention to the Skelton Glacier and, in spite of deep snow, managed to climb it before winter. They established a depot at the top of it which was stocked by air. Hillary was still not content, however. He wanted to try out his farm tractors and decided to make a journey to Cape Crozier, repeating the incredible winter journey made by Wilson and described by Apsley Cherry-Garrard on Scott’s expedition in 1910.
They had set out in the middle of winter to investigate the nesting habits of the emperor penguin. In Cherry-Garrard’s words: ‘And so we started just after midwinter on the weirdest birdsnesting expedition that has ever been or ever will be.’ For nineteen days three of them had hauled a heavily laden sledge through the bitter cold and dark of the Antarctic winter. They had then built a tiny stone hut at Cape Crozier as a shelter while they observed the penguins. I remember reading the account while I was on an expedition to Nuptse, the third peak of Everest. Whenever I thought the climbing was getting at all rough, all I had to do was to read Cherry-Garrard’s description to know that our Himalayan expedition was a holiday compared to what they had gone through.
Hillary’s experience was also very much easier. Having set out on 19 March with two tractors, they took three days to cover the distance that had taken Wilson and his party nineteen. It did give them an insight, however, into some of the drawbacks of the tractors and produced ideas for modification to improve both their performance and comfort. As a result of their experience, Hillary built a canvas shelter for the driver of each tractor and a caravan or caboose on runners, so that the team could use it for cooking and sleeping in during their journey the following year. As on the other side, the New Zealand team spent the winter preparing for the summer’s activities and doing scientific work. Hillary, in consultation with the scientists, had prepared an extensive programme for the following year but was then amazed – indeed, outraged – when the Committee of Management back in New Zealand vetoed many of his plans as being too ambitious or risky.
‘I had no particular desire to offend the committee but I was confident that the programme was well within our powers. I continued as though the exchange of messages had never occurred, made a few worthwhile modifications to the plans and reintroduced the idea of a push towards the Pole it I could get enough extra fuel at Depot 700. It was becoming clear to me that a supporting role was not my particular strength. Once we had done all that was asked of us and a good bit more – I could see no reason why we shouldn’t organise a few interesting challenges for ourselves.’
Hillary’s approach to his venture was as a mountaineer. The summit was the South Pole and he wanted to get there. His three team members, like himself, had had no previous Antarctic experience. Pete Mulgrew was a petty officer in the New Zealand Navy and an expert on wireless communications. He was also a climber and he and Hillary formed a close friendship from the very start. Mulgrew’s original role had been to remain at Base, controlling the rear link back to the outside world, but he had set his heart on the Pole from the very beginning, was irrepressibly adventurous and, anyway, Hillary needed a good wireless operator for their polar journey. The other two members of the ‘Old firm’, as they called themselves, were Jim Bates, a brilliant mechanic and inventor who was also an expert skier, and Murray Ellis who was an engineering graduate with sound mechanical knowledge. Hillary was the only member of the team who knew anything about celestial navigation, and so he would have the sole responsibility for pointing them in the right direction.
They set out from Scott Base on 14 October with their one Weasel and three tractors towing the cumbersome caboose they had made and the heavily laden sledges. No one had much confidence in the tractors, since they had not been designed for the task in hand and the modifications were of a makeshift character. Two dog teams, with Bob Miller and George Marsh, one of the two English polar experts with the expedition, were flown in to the foot of the Skelton Glacier, so that they could lead the route which they had already completed the previous year. With the constant threat of concealed crevasses, the four drivers took turns in going out in front to make the route, each trusting the ability of the others. This was in marked contrast to Fuchs’ approach. He insisted on being out in front the whole time, physically leading the expedition, taking the major risk, but also taking the satisfaction of actually finding a route. Hillary’s policy of sharing the lead among the team certainly increased the enjoyment of the individual team members and also enabled them to make better progress. In a matter of days, Hillary had reached the Antarctic plateau, ready to establish his depots and then, once free of this responsibility, make his push for the Pole. He set out across the plateau on 12 November, just one day before Fuchs reached South Ice – still on the reconnaissance. The main party had not even left Shackleton Base, and were still not ready for their part of the expedition.
Vivian Fuchs now announced that, come what may, they would set out on 24 November. It meant working round the clock to get all the vehicles ready in time but, on the 24th at 6.45 p.m., they were ready at last and set out with three Sno-Cats, two Weasels and a converted Muskeg tractor. There were eleven men in the party and they were going to pick up the vehicles used in their recce at South Ice, also the two dog teams which had found the route up on to the plateau. It was a very much larger team than Hillary’s and, of course, had further to go. The atmosphere and discipline of the party was also very different. Fuchs made the decisions. The only person with whom he consulted closely was his deputy leader, David Stratton, an Antarctic veteran from an Antarctic-experienced family background; he had been to Harrow School and concealed behind a relaxed, easy-going manner, immense determination and an extremely well-ordered mind. He did much to soften and warm Vivian Fuchs’ cool, unemotional – at times apparently insensitive – approach to his fellow expedition members.
From the very start it was slow going. They were not making much better progress than had the reconnaissance. The vehicles regularly smashed into concealed crevasses or were forced to make long and painful diversions. By 29 November, five days out from Shackleton Base, they had covered only forty miles. On that same day, Ed Hillary reached Depot 480 on the plateau; he was 480 miles into his journey, some 770 miles from the South Pole.
But now they were on the move, the morale of the Fuchs party was high. Lowe commented:
‘I had always been critical of the lack of cohesion, of bad communications, of being kept in the dark about expedition plans, of the failure to give both men and vehicles at least a taste of rehearsal before the big journey began; and I tended also to be the channel through whom Bunny would receive the grievances of others in the party. As I followed the yellow tail of Bunny’s Cat into the wilderness, I felt a little contrite and resolved to be more reasonable.’
Other members of the team, the old polar hands, were less critical than George Lowe. Hal Lister, who shared a tent throughout the expedition with George, had already had a two-year stint on the Greenland Ice Cap. He was a glaciologist and accepted the discipline and structured command which prevails in polar circles. Indeed, he even found Bunny Fuchs to be positively easy-going compared with the naval commander who had been in charge of his Greenland expedition. He had that polar mentality that accepts, even welcomes, the long monotonous grind of polar travel, the conservatism that rejects new foods, equipment or ways of doing things in favour of the well-tried ways of tradition. There were aspects of Fuchs’ approach that even Lowe found he had to agree with. The question of tent sharing was one. Rather than leave it to the individual, Fuchs posted on the noticeboard the list of the six tent pairings with a footnote stressing that they were final and that there would be no swapping during the journey. Lowe wrote:
‘At first I thought this was a mistake but looking back I realise that Bunny was right. Over the long journey where the going was mostly a monotonous unchanging ice desert with occasional moments of fear and excitement, there had to be an attitude of hardness and an intelligent determination to quash the inevitable personal differences and be ever-aware that we simply must live cheerfully together. The philosophy took the general line, “You volunteered, so get on with it”.’
Above all, whatever reservations Lowe or others might have had about Fuchs’ style of leadership, they could not help respecting both his determination and ability. Nobody ever challenged his commands. The morale of the traversing team remained high throughout.
It was a long-drawn-out marathon with its own built-in routine. There was, of course, no night and they could have travelled twenty-four hours a day, around the clock – as indeed Hillary did on quite a few occasions. Fuchs, on the other hand, settled into a steady routine, partly dictated by his own policy of staying out in front the whole time. He could only motor for as long as his own endurance would keep him going. On the whole they worked an eighteen-hour day, with six hours in each twenty-four given over to rest and sleep. At the end of a stint, Fuchs would signal the stop, the vehicles would draw up and the pyramid tents would be taken off the sledges. There was always something of a race to be the first party to erect one’s tent and have a brew going. One man would have the outside berth and he would do all the outside jobs, while the one with the inside berth would disappear into the tent the moment it was erected, would accept and place the reindeer-skin mats, sleeping bags, food box and stove and would then get a brew on, trying to have it ready by the time the outside man had finished his chores of staking out the tent and preparing everything for the ‘night’ outside.
The evening meal was the traditional sledging ration of pemmican hooch, a huge slab of butter plastered over a biscuit and very sweet cocoa. It was monotonous, never varied but somehow in the extreme cold the taste buds seem to be anaesthetised and you can eat almost anything. The key thing was that this sledging ration had sufficient calories to keep them going in the extreme cold. One of the reasons that Scott’s party had died was that they were not taking enough calories each day and, as a result, slowly starved to death, losing the strength to withstand the cold and the gruelling labour of hauling their sledges. Hillary had shrugged aside the traditional Arctic ration and, in this perhaps, made a mistake. Fuchs told me:
‘Hillary threw out all the sledging rations and put in a lot of tins of sausages and beans and other tinned foods. The Americans said to me when we arrived at the Pole, “We’re glad to see that you’re in such good shape. Hillary and his party were on their last legs when they got here.” That was their comment. It was the food they’d taken with them. They didn’t have enough sustenance.’
And then sleep – it was warm enough in the down sleeping bags, though through the journey the bags got progressively more damp from the condensation of sweat as it reached the outer layers which could be –30 °C. The jangle of the alarm having woken them, the outside man would reach out, struggle to light the Primus stove and then shove on to it a panful of snow or ice collected the previous night. He would then have a few more precious minutes of warmth, lying dozing to the sound of the Primus. Once it was ready, a big mugful of tea and a biscuit overloaded with butter, perhaps some porridge, preceded the most painful moment of the day – getting out of the warmth of the pit for another gruelling day of travel. Everything was in an automated routine: outside man gets dressed and out first, then the inside man, who passes everything out of the tent, including the ground sheet. His final act is to drop his trousers and relieve himself in the precious shelter and comparative warmth of the now empty tent. Having done this he crawls out and the outside man takes his turn. It is very important to get one’s bowels into the correct rhythm to avoid the agony of a frozen bum!
Once the gear was loaded on to the sledge, it was time to start up the vehicles. Every piece of metal was around –30 °C, cold enough to give you a frostburn if you touched it with a bare hand. The gasoline had been specially treated to expel all water or water vapour, since this would inevitably freeze, and little particles of ice would then block the jets of the carburettor. Even so, there could still be some icing. They used hot air guns, sometimes even played a blowtorch over the cylinder block and fuel tubes to warm up the engine and get it going. An engine would roar into life, then another; the laggards might be given a tow start, or one of the engineers would come over to give the unfortunate driver the benefit of his expertise until, at last, all the engines were throbbing away.
Fuchs would give a wave from his Sno-Cat, Rock’n Roll, and away he’d go, his team obediently following. Sometimes it was easy going in smooth, firm snow and the vehicles could cream along at a steady four to five miles per hour. More often the snow was deep with the tracks sinking and thrashing into a slough of snow or, even worse, the ground was heavily crevassed with huge chasms, some of them 1,000 feet deep and big enough to house St Paul’s Cathedral. It was the covered crevasses that were the problem. A dog team could have crossed many of them, unaware that they even existed, but a big Sno-Cat could break through a snow bridge several yards thick. The only way to get through a badly crevassed area was to go out on foot and probe for the holes – slow, tiring work. Even so, it was possible to miss some. Snow would suddenly collapse under the front Sno-Cat and it would lunge forwards and downwards, restrained only by the towrope leading back to the heavily laden sledge. Pontoons swung at crazy angles, the vehicle poised over the dark chasm. It could take anything from five to twenty hours using all five vehicles, either heaving or anchoring, to lift it out smoothly.
There were the occasional cocoa breaks during the day, when drivers from different vehicles might come over and chat for a few minutes. Hal Lister and George Lowe held literary lunches in the Weasel cabin; lunch was a buttered biscuit, and their guests would take turns at discussing and describing the books they were each reading at the time.
The only change in the routine came when a day, or part of a day, was devoted to maintenance. This happened all too often, for the tracks had to be greased every few hundred miles. This was a hideous job, for the grease, congealed by the cold, resisted all pressure to pump it into the frozen nipples on the tracks. If you got any grease on your anorak, and it was almost inevitable that you did, the windproof quality of that particular patch was lost for ever; you had to lie in the snow, crawl under the vehicle, bend contorted to reach round awkward corners, all in the bitter cold. For someone like myself who is unmechanical, the very thought is appalling, and yet the crews became fond of their charges, attributing to them an almost human character as they coaxed and struggled with their foibles on the long drive across the Antarctic.
Fuchs, at last, reached South Ice – the depot and advanced base they had established the previous year – on 21 December. Unemotional as ever, he quickly diffused any euphoria amongst his team with the admonishment as they approached the little hut covered in snow: ‘Well, there it is. We’re going in now. And don’t forget – no looting.’
And, as Fuchs addressed his little team, Hillary had actually set out on the last leg of his dash for the Pole. He had fulfilled all his duties in reaching and supervising the stocking by air of Depot 700. By this time the Weasel had come to a grinding halt, but the three farm tractors were still going strong. Even so, some members of Hillary’s team were worried about their prospects. Now out of range of aerial support, they were wondering what would happen if their way was barred by soft snow or extensive crevasse systems. George Marsh and Bob Miller wanted to explore the region around Depot 700, but to do this effectively they needed another depot put in by the tractors. Hillary suspected this was a ploy to deflect him from the Pole and felt that it would be just as easy to put in a depot from the air. They spent a day talking round the pros and cons, the one thing remaining fixed in Hillary’s mind being the determination to make a push for the Pole, even if it meant taking just one tractor. He felt that he had fulfilled his duties as the leader of a big scientific expedition, with the prime task of supporting Vivian Fuchs’ crossing. Now he was the climber, sitting in the top camp, with the summit in sight. He talked the others round to his view and they resolved to go for the Pole.
They set out on 20 December with the three tractors. That evening there was a message from his Committee, forbidding him to go beyond Depot 700. Since he was already beyond it, he chose to ignore the directive, sending a message to Fuchs that he was heading for the Pole, the first time that he had actually declared his intention.
They stormed on through soft snows and heavily crevassed regions, travelling twenty-four hours at a go, taking turns at the stressful job of making the route out in front, swapping the driving between the five men who were now divided between the three tractors. On Christmas Day they paused to listen to a special Christmas broadcast from New Zealand and to eat a Christmas dinner washed down by brandy. It was warm and cosy in the caboose. They were now about 250 miles from the Pole.
Fuchs and his party were still at South Ice, where the entire team managed to cram into the little hut, now buried in snow, for their Christmas dinner. The following day Fuchs sent a message to Hillary, asking him to put in another depot between Depot 700 and the Pole, which would mean abandoning all attempts at going to the Pole. Hillary commented:
‘I didn’t have to do much figuring. We had just enough fuel to reach either the Pole or back to Depot 700. The only way we could establish a depot was to stop and sit where we were – and hope that Bunny would arrive when our food ran out. It would be a lot easier – and safer – to fly some more fuel into Depot 700. Or get a few drums deposited at the Pole by the Americans. I had the unkind suspicion that this was an excuse to stop us going on to the Pole without actually telling us not to.’
Hillary ignored the edict and kept going. It was savagely cold; the snow was soft and their progress worryingly slow. He abandoned everything that was not absolutely essential, paring down their food and fuel to the bare minimum needed to reach the Pole, and still they pushed on. At last, on 4 January, they sighted a tiny black dot in the distance – then another, and another; it was the line of marker flags leading them to the Pole, where the Americans had an International Geophysical Year base. He had reached his summit, with the minimum of reserves to spare. They were tired and hungry, had only twenty gallons of fuel left, but that did not matter for they had achieved their objective. There was no scientific or geographical purpose in their dash; it was an adventurous self-indulgence that any climber would find irresistible. Hillary wrote:
‘What did we achieve by our Southern journey? We had located the crevasse areas and established the route and we had been the first vehicle party to travel overland to the South Pole – that was something, I suppose. But we had produced no scientific data about the ice, and little information about its properties. We showed that if you were enthusiastic enough and had good mechanics you could get a farm tractor to the South Pole – which doesn’t sound much to risk your life for. The press had a field day on the pros and cons of our journey, but for me the decision had been reasonably straightforward. I would have despised myself if I hadn’t continued – it was as simple as that – I just had to go on.’
How different were Fuchs’ motives. A great deal of invaluable scientific work was done both by Fuchs on his side of the continent and also by the large scientific contingent attached to Hillary’s support party. But the journey itself was an adventure, similar in concept to sailing round the world or making the traverse of a mountaintop. Fuchs claimed that his reasons for crossing Antarctica were those of scientific curiosity but, by making it a single dramatic push from one side to the other, there was undoubtedly a conflict between the needs of a comprehensive scientific programme and the exigencies of a tight schedule. It could be argued that more would have been achieved if the traverse had been spread over several years. As it was, they did manage to make a series of seismic soundings of the depth of the ice cap, but the other scientific work was inevitably of a fairly perfunctory nature. Hal Lister, the glaciologist, admitted rather ruefully that he had to fit his own programme, of examining snow and ice layers immediately below the surface, into periods when the expedition happened to pause for maintenance or some other purpose. I suspect that Fuchs, the scientist and Antarctic explorer, was after all not so very different from Ed Hillary in his motivation.
But Fuchs was still 380 miles from the Pole and the Antarctic autumn was approaching. At the Pole, Hillary was becoming more and more worried by Fuchs’ slow progress. He was haunted by the appalling spectre of spending another winter in Antarctica. He had done his job, had achieved his goal, and wanted to go home to his family. Already he had been away for over a year, average by polar standards, but a long time to a mountaineer whose expeditions are unlikely to last for more than six months. Hillary’s two mechanics, Murray Ellis and Jim Bates, stated categorically that it was getting too late in the season and that under no circumstances were they prepared to wait for Fuchs to arrive at the Pole. Hillary, therefore, sent Fuchs a message, suggesting that on reaching the South Pole, Fuchs should fly out for the winter, leaving his vehicles behind, and then return the following summer to complete the journey. This, of course, was completely unacceptable to Fuchs, who immediately replied, ‘Appreciate your concern but there can be no question of abandoning journey at this stage. Innumerable reasons make it impracticable to remount the expedition after wintering outside Antarctica. Our vehicles can be and have been operated at –60 °C but I do not expect such temperatures in March.’
Fuchs called one of his rare expedition meetings and read out both Hillary’s message and his own reply. In Lowe’s words, ‘There was no discussion of either the message or the decision – and we drove on. Nobody in the party had the slightest wish to postpone our crossing of the continent; on that score we were in full accord with our leader.’
It was unfortunate that a copy of Hillary’s message was released to the press by his Committee in New Zealand. It had been meant as a helpful suggestion, but the press, who already had had a field day in creating a ‘race for the Pole’ between Fuchs and Hillary, with the big question of whether Hillary was disobeying orders, now had the sniff of another controversy in the doubts expressed about Fuchs’ ability to complete the trip that year. Fuchs, as always, remained aloof. He had stated that he was going to finish the trip that year and, as far as he was concerned, that was enough. Hillary accepted Fuchs’ decision and offered his services as guide once Fuchs’ reached the Pole. He did not wait there, however, but flew back to Scott Base for a few days’ rest.
Fuchs pressed on, now making very much better progress, the going being over reasonably firm snow and free of crevasses. On 19 January, the small convoy of vehicles, bedecked in flags and bunting, reached the Pole at last. In that moment of intense excitement, as the vehicles cruised up to the little collection of huts that marked the South Pole Base, and as Fuchs jumped out of the leading vehicle to be greeted by Ed Hillary and Admiral Dufek, Commander of the Americans in the Antarctic, George Lowe was still baffled, downright exasperated by the enigmatic Fuchs. ‘Bunny Fuchs was like the profile of the continent itself – tough, flat, unchanging, dogged; and after three years in his company I could not say I knew him.’
In many ways, Fuchs’ own appraisal of himself mirrors Lowe’s observations. Fuchs told me in the summer of 1980:
‘I don’t allow things to unbalance me; I try to keep a steady course. Some people say this is very uninteresting. George, for instance, actually said to me, “Come on. Why is it that you never seem to get enthusiastic about anything?” I said, “You mean you want Caesar to exhort his troops?” And he said, “Well, something like that”. I said, “Well, if we get into a state of euphoria we’re going to make mistakes just as much as we would if we get into a state of melancholia. As far as I’m concerned we just proceed and things come to pass. No need to get excited about it!”’
And proceed they did. After a few days at the South Pole, sleeping in warm beds, eating gigantic meals in the American mess hall and working on the Sno-Cats, they were ready to start once again.
The significance of the Pole was strange. Unlike the top of a mountain, it was merely a geographical point on the Antarctic plateau, barely halfway across in journey terms. The presence of a hutted camp, with many of the comforts of civilisation, made it all the more bizarre. And yet there was a feeling of having reached a top, certainly one that Hillary had felt and one that Fuchs’ party could also share. Even though the journey from the Pole to Scott Base had some very difficult and heavy ground to cross, it had the qualities of the downhill run on known ground, with the tracks of Hillary’s vehicles marking the way. Hillary himself flew into Depot 700 to help guide them to the head of the Skelton Glacier and then down it. Even so, this was the most exhausting part of the journey. Racing against the Antarctic winter, they still stopped at regular intervals to make their seismic soundings of the ice cap. They were beginning to get run down and tired, all too ready to end their journey.
At last, on 2 March, the four Sno-Cats, the only vehicles to complete the entire crossing, rolled into Scott Base. They had travelled 2,158 miles across the Antarctic continent. Vivian Fuchs had estimated that it would take them a hundred days. He had completed the journey in ninety-one.