The two poles provide parallels but also extreme contrasts, as opposite to each other as their seasons, when the perpetual darkness of midwinter at one Pole is contrasted by the continuous glare of summer sun on the other. In common they have the cold, the wind, the snows and the ice, but that is all. The South Pole is set on an ice cap 9,386 feet thick, in the heart of a huge continent. The North Pole is in the midst of an ice-clad ocean, a gigantic jigsaw of shifting ice floes, whose geography is in constant flux, dictated by the surge of the seas beneath and around the ice. Floes are split, then subdivided again and again; great floes are swept together, one climbing on to another, a microcosm of the action of the drift of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Pressure ridges of ice blocks are hurled up as the floes crash and grind together. From the air the line of a pressure ridge seems little more than a few ripples, but to a man standing on the bucking ice it has all the threat and violence of a severe earthquake.
The interior of Antarctica is the most sterile, empty desert in the world. There is no life, no vegetation, not even lichen, just snow, ice and barren rock. There is, however, life in the Arctic, nurtured by the black seas beneath the ice. Fish provide food for the seals, and polar bears stalking the seals have been spotted wandering in the remotest parts of the Arctic Ocean, far from solid land. But this animal life cycle is insufficient to sustain man. As in the Antarctic, he must carry his food and fuel with him as he combats the fierce cold, the glare of the long summer and the dark of winter. In the Antarctic there are the dangers of hidden crevasses, while in the Arctic there is the ever-shifting sea, the threat of your shelter being split in two, of falling into the icy waters, or being engulfed in the gigantic grinder of a shifting pressure ridge.
The heroic age of exploration at both Poles was around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but while the Antarctic has a theme of conventional heroism, of good teamwork and good chaps where, even in disaster, they died with a stiff upper lip leaving the right kind of message, in the Arctic there has always been a strain of the contentious that goes back to the earliest efforts to find the fabled North-West Passage. There are tales of mutiny, of cannibalism, of disintegration. In the story of the first men to reach the North Pole there is an ugly dispute that has not been fully resolved even today.
In many ways, Robert Edwin Peary was of the same mould as Captain Scott or Ernest Shackleton. An officer in the Civil Engineer Corps of the US Navy, he devoted a large part of his adult life to Arctic exploration in Northern Greenland and then to his efforts to reach the North Pole. A gruff, outspoken man, he was weak in both tact and diplomacy, but was almost obsessively thorough and very determined. His attempt in 1909 was carefully planned, using a combination of Eskimo experience of the Arctic and the modern technology of the time. His specially designed ship, Roosevelt, sailed as far north as possible into the ice before the arrival of winter. Early the following spring he set out using a series of trail-breaking parties to force the way for him to a point just 153 miles from the Pole. Then, with his manservant, Henson, and four Eskimos, he cut loose to push through to the Pole in the space of five days’ hard sledging. It was only on his way back home he learned that Frederick A. Cook, who had been his doctor on his first polar expedition, had claimed to have reached the Pole a full year before.
Cook’s story was certainly remarkable. He claimed to have set out from the north point of Axel Heiberg Island, 520 miles from the Pole, with four Eskimos. Two of them returned after a few days, leaving the threesome to make their push for the Pole. Cook claimed to have reached it on 21 April 1908, but there were many discrepancies in his claim. How could he have carried all the food that the three of them, plus the dogs, would need for the length of time he claimed they took to get there and back? He had lost all the paperwork of his navigational readings, having left his instruments on his way out with a member of Peary’s party. Cook claimed that they vanished, while Whitney, the man who had accepted Cook’s belongings, denied there had ever been any written records and claimed he had only been given instruments. Two factions quickly formed, each bent on discrediting the other. The problem is that there is no way anyone can prove he has been to the Pole. It is not like a mountain, where, except in the worst weather, photographs can give positive evidence that the climber has reached the top. It all comes down to credibility. In the end Cook’s story was dismissed, not just on the evidence or lack of it, but also in the light of earlier claims he had made to have climbed Mount McKinley for the first time – a claim which was also discredited. Peary was given official recognition and his name appears in all atlases today, though even in his case the proof was not conclusive. His average progress rate while breaking trail with support parties had never exceeded twelve miles a day and yet, once he pushed forward with Henson and his four Eskimo companions, he claimed to have averaged twenty-five miles a day, both on the way to the Pole and all the way back to Roosevelt. This was remarkable if compared with the progress of others; Nansen, one of the greatest Arctic travellers, had only once managed to travel twenty-five miles in a day on polar pack ice.
It is probable that the North Pole was still untouched until it was invaded by modern technology, when man could reach it not only from the air but also by nuclear submarine, and USS Nautilus cruised beneath it on 3 August 1958, only a few months after Fuchs had completed his crossing of Antarctica. But no one had reached the North Pole across the surface since Peary made his bid in 1909 and the greatest journey of all – a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean – was still untried.
It was this concept that captured the imagination of Wally Herbert. A luxuriant beard and a quiet intensity of manner, eyes wrinkled from gazing into the wind and glare of the snows on the British Antarctic Survey, give Herbert the unmistakeable stamp of a polar explorer. Born in 1934, he was the son of an army officer who had risen up from the ranks.
By the age of fourteen he was dreaming of being an explorer, but there seemed little chance of realising this ambition. His father, with whom he had a strained relationship, partly no doubt because of his long absences, wanted him to go into the army. But Wally felt uncomfortable with what he had already seen of life in the officers’ mess. He told me: ‘I was given a kind of grooming in officer’s behaviour; I would have to play billiards with the captains and talk politely with the CO, dress for dinner and all that sort of thing. It was a deadly, deadly way of spending your holidays as a teenage lad.’
And yet the army seemed to open up the only road to any kind of adventure, and so he signed on for twenty-two years at the age of seventeen, going into the Engineers to train as a surveyor which he hoped would take him into unexplored lands. Diffident, unsure of himself, he failed to get a commission and, within weeks, bitterly regretted joining the army. He spent most of the next three years fretting over whether they would let him out at the end of this initial period. Fortunately they did; once again, he showed an adventurous streak, hitch-hiking home from Egypt around the Middle Eastern countries and back to England, where he started looking for a job. He seemed a long way from a life of exploration and adventure in a job at a surveyors’ office on the south coast.
He made few friends; quiet, introverted and very lonely, he seemed trapped in a humdrum life with very little future. As so often happens, it was a coincidence that led him to the life to which he was most suited. Wally told me:
‘I was sitting in a bus; my raincoat was soaking wet and there were drips coming off everything, steaming in this horrible smelly bus. The bus lurched and a newspaper fell off the luggage rack smack into my lap. It was open at the public appointments page and two of the things I noticed straight away were one advert for a surveyor in Kenya and another one for team members for an expedition to the Antarctic.’
He had found the answer to his discontent. On reaching the office he didn’t dare answer the advertisements during working hours, so slipped into the lavatory, sat on the loo with the top down and wrote off for further details. Interviews followed and he was offered both jobs.
‘I had to make a choice, Kenya or the Antarctic. I’d always dreamed of going to Kenya and had never really thought much about the Antarctic at all, but at this point, without really thinking it out, I immediately chose the Antarctic. There was some magic in the word “expedition” which touched the romantic in me. I could easily have gone to Kenya and have spent the rest of my life in the hotter parts of the world.’
At twenty, Wally Herbert joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, at Hope Bay, Antarctica, and found a contentment he had never known before:
‘A monastic life without religious exercise. There, we were a world of men in harmony with our environment – twelve men around a bunkhouse fire, or two men in a drumming tent, or one man in the solitude of summer-warmed hills. We saw a paradise in snowscapes and heard music in the wind, for we were young and on our long exploratory journey we felt, with the pride of youth, that we were making history.’
At the end of his two-and-a-half-year stint, Wally hitch-hiked through South America and the United States before returning home to England. A trip to Spitsbergen, another stint in the Antarctic, this time with a New Zealand expedition operating out of Scott Base, and he had achieved the experience and, perhaps, the spur that led him to undertake his journey across the Arctic. In Antarctica he had conceived an exciting plan of exploring a range of mountains last visited on Scott’s expedition and then, at the end of the season, making his own dash to the South Pole to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Scott’s ill-fated journey. It meant a tremendous amount to Wally Herbert, but the authorities turned it down. He had too great a respect for authority to ignore the veto, as his name had allowed Hillary to do in 1958. As a consolation, he made his way with his dog teams down the Axel Heiberg Glacier, the route taken by Amundsen in his historic journey to the Pole in 1910. But Herbert’s memory of the Antarctic was forever tarnished by his disappointment.
‘I didn’t ever want to go to the South Pole from that moment on or to ever go back to the Antarctic – I’d worked it completely out of my system because I knew that next year they’d be coming in with aeroplanes to photograph the area and to put their surveyors on our bloody mountain peaks and on our survey claims. They’d make better maps than we’d made ourselves. It seemed like the end of this whole phase of my life – I must go and do something new.’
Back in England, living at his parents’ home, he was existing off the small advance for a book about his Antarctic experience and the proceeds of a few lectures. It was at this stage that he started to think of the Arctic and that longest great polar journey, the crossing of the Arctic Ocean. Wally has a very strong sense of history and he is intensely patriotic.
‘It was absolutely imperative that it was a British expedition that did it because of the four-hundred-year tradition and heritage and all the blood, sweat and scurvy and folklore that was built into this.
‘But at the time it didn’t occur to me that it should be me because I hadn’t enough experience, I was still too young and I hadn’t had an expedition on my own. I’d led expeditions in the field, but I’d never actually organised them or raised the money for them.’
The idea was there, but also the self-doubt. I felt very much the same before I led my first expedition to the South Face of Annapurna. In Wally’s case the transition from vague dreams to a dogged determination to get his concept off the ground came through a growing realisation of how feasible the scheme was, given the right mixture of dedication and support. The ice floes of the Arctic Ocean are in constant movement, driven by the ocean currents. Explorers of the past had tried to utilise this movement; Nansen, in Fram, allowed himself to be trapped in the ice off the coast of Siberia, hoping to drift over or close to the Pole. In the event, he did not get close enough to make a successful dash over the ice to his objective. But now much more was known about the pattern of drift. The Russians had been establishing scientific stations on the ice and were drifting slowly across towards North Greenland. Since the drift was in a circular direction, swinging round and over the Pole, Wally saw that it would be possible to go in with a small party, using dog teams for fast, light progress when conditions were suitable, but always going on the line of drift, so that even when sitting out the summer period when there were too many open leads of water, or the winter when it was too cold and dark, they would still be sweeping, however slowly, in the right direction. He liked the idea of dog teams, had little sympathy with the encroaching technology of the noisy Snowmobile that he had seen used more and more in the Antarctic. His preference for dogs was both romantic and practical. Quite apart from being a traditional mode of transport, completely in keeping with the spirit of adventure, there was less to go wrong with a dog and, if it should die, at least its fellow-dogs could eat it. A broken-down Skidoo or Snowmobile, if you could not repair it, was just a pile of useless scrap metal.
Even so, Wally realised that he could not be completely independent. There was no way his party could carry enough food for the sixteen months it would take dogs and men to cross the Arctic Ocean on its longest axis from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen. This meant he would have to depend on supplies from the air, which also meant that he would need good radio communications with the outside world. All this was going to cost a lot of money, and the co-operation of government bodies, not just in Britain but in the United States and Canada as well. It was a formidable challenge for a thirtv-two-year-old, who was not well known, had no connections with the establishment or media, and no real qualifications except for some sound experience in the Antarctic. But in spite of his doubts and frequent rebuffs Wally Herbert doggedly pursued his vision.
In 1964 he took the first draft of his plan to Sir Vivian Fuchs who was both interested and encouraging. Wally then managed to get a small grant from the Royal Geographical Society and went off to the States to research his project. He even flew his proposed route in a DC8 but, on his return to England, now heavily in debt, the Royal Geographical Society rejected his 20,000-word submission on the grounds that there was too much adventure and insufficient scientific weight to the scheme.
But Wally struggled on, writing hundreds of letters to everyone who had ever had anything to do with the Arctic. His determination paid off and, slowly, he gathered a body of influential people to support his plans in a Committee of Management, bristling with illustrious names, from Sir Vivian Fuchs to the Sergeant Surgeon to the Queen. With this kind of support, Wally was now able to get the approval of the Royal Geographical Society. It was important to him not merely for the launching of his expedition, but also on a personal level, as a seal of acceptance by the exploratory and scientific establishment of which Wally desperately wanted to be part. This extract from his book Across the Top of the World is revealing:
‘By the time I left I was almost certain I had, at last, the approval of the Society – an approval confirmed later by the pleasant expressions and, in some cases, even the smiles of the members of the Committee as they walked in threes and fours through the halls to the gentlemen’s cloakroom (where I had hung about for almost halt an hour, knowing that I would, if I waited long enough, meet them as they came in to collect their bowler hats).’
Wally was now able to go forward at full bore with his plans, but it was still very much a one-man venture. He had chosen his team – all of them old hands from the Antarctic – Roger Tufft, a school teacher living in the Lake District, Allan Gill, whose life has been devoted to the empty spaces of the Antarctic and Arctic, and Fritz Koerner, a glaciologist who was working at an American university. From my own experience of climbing expeditions, I have always found that a level of involvement by all members of the team has helped in both increasing commitment to the venture and in building a sense of unity before setting out. It was perhaps unfortunate that as Wally’s team were all so scattered, it was impractical for any of them to help in the actual organisation. This led to even greater pressure on Wally while the others remained almost uninvolved until they actually joined the expedition, though it seems unlikely that Wally would have delegated much responsibility, even given the chance. Allan Gill commented, ‘I think Wally has to do the whole lot; he has to do it his way and I would never even suggest taking on a share because I just don’t think it would work.’ Roger Tufft, who was particularly interested in the design of the sledges and practical details of the training expedition, regretted that he was not consulted and been more involved.
It was now October 1966; Wally was still a long way from getting the £54,000 he thought he was going to need, but he had just enough to carry out the training expedition that he felt was an essential prelude to the main venture. Fritz Koerner was tied up with his job in America, but Allan Gill and Roger Tufft were free to go. They planned to spend the winter near the Eskimo settlement of Qanaq, in North-West Greenland, so that they could try out the little prefabricated hut Wally had ordered for wintering on the main expedition. In the early spring they set out on a long sledge journey across Ellesmere Island and then up the Nansen Sound to the top of Axel Heiberg Island, the place that Cook had claimed to have set out from on his bid for the Pole. They had to prove themselves and their gear capable of a long sledge journey over the broken pack ice of the sounds between the islands to convince potential sponsors that their plans for the polar crossing had at least a chance of success. So Wally was determined, at all costs, to complete the journey.
The project also provided a test in their own relationships. Roger Tufft was the same age as Wally, had joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey at the same time; they had sledged together and had got on well, but that was ten years before. Since then they had seen little of each other. After leaving the Antarctic Roger Tufft had gone with Bill Tilman on two of his long and adventurous sea voyages; he had also been exploring in Lapland and Spitsbergen and manhauling sledges across the Greenland Ice Cap. Welsh by birth, a school teacher with an excellent mind, he was used to taking the initiative and it was, perhaps, inevitable that he and Wally would clash. Allan Gill, on the other hand, was much more easy-going than Roger. Polar regions were his life, with the short periods he spent in civilisation a slightly uncomfortable interlude. Quiet, very modest, lean almost to the degree of emaciation, Allan Gill, then aged thirty-six, was the oldest member of the team. He had learnt as much as possible about polar regions, turning himself into a first-class scientific assistant who could cope with almost any aspect of polar life or research. He did not have the same conflict of loyalties that Roger had between a life and career in civilisation and the expedition they were about to undertake. For Allan, it he were not on the polar crossing, would have joined some other Arctic expedition and, in fact, had already turned down an invitation to lead a very attractive American scientific expedition.
Their journey stretched them and their equipment to the limit. The lightweight sledges disintegrated under the loads and they had to obtain the heavier Eskimo variety. Having thought themselves proficient dog drivers from their experience in the Antarctic, they now found that they were little better than novices when compared with the Eskimos. They ran out of food, reached the last stages of exhaustion, were well behind with their schedule and yet Wally still clung doggedly to his original plan, knowing how vital it was to gaining his sponsors’ confidence.
Altogether, they travelled 1,200 miles and were only 143 miles short of Resolute Bay, their eventual destination, when Wally realised that they could afford no more time. In only six months he wanted to set out from Point Barrow on their great journey. He therefore radioed for a plane to fly in to pick them up.
It was on 19 June, while they waited for the plane, that Roger Tufft told Wally he had decided to pull out of the expedition. Roger felt that there was insufficient time to get the main trip organised; their gear had proved inadequate and the radio had not been sufficiently powerful but, most important of all, Roger and Wally had found their personalities no longer seemed compatible. There had been a level of stress throughout their journey, with Roger frequently disagreeing with Wally’s decisions.
Wally flew out first with some of the gear and it was six days before the plane was able to fly back to pick up Allan Gill and Roger Tufft – six days of agony for Wally for he could not help wondering whether Allan, also, might decide to defect. Wally wrote:
‘I knew, and I guess he knew too, that if he joined Roger and backed out, the trans-Arctic expedition would fold up; for it would be impossible for me to convince my Committee, sponsors and many supporters that the plan was still viable and that I, as the leader, was still competent, if two of my chosen companions, after a nine-month trial in the Arctic, had lost confidence in my leadership and in the feasibility of the plan.’
There would be no time for private discussion, for Allan Gill had to fly straight on from Resolute Bay to join a summer scientific camp on Devon Island. As he climbed into the aircraft, he said to Wally, ‘I’ll see you in London in September’. It was an expression of support and loyalty that Wally would never forget.
The Committee were undoubtedly shaken by Roger Tufft’s resignation, insisting that Wally telegram Gill and Koerner to obtain their assurance that they were till part of the expedition. Fritz Koerner, who had not been on the training expedition, had a difficult decision to make. A close friend of Roger Tufft, he had great respect for his judgement. In addition, Fritz’s wife, Anna, was due to have their first baby around the time they were going to set out from Point Barrow. He was also concerned about the scientific content of the expedition. He was attracted by the adventurous concept of the crossing of the Arctic Ocean, but only if he was also going to be able to complete some sound glaciological research on the way. Nevertheless, setting aside his doubts, he cabled his acceptance.
But Wally still had to find a replacement for Roger Tufft. His Committee of Management favoured a doctor and, accordingly, made enquiries through the Royal Army Medical Corps for a suitable candidate. This was how Ken Hedges came into the expedition. At thirty-one, he was medical officer for the crack Special Air Service Regiment. He had no polar experience, but did have an impressive set of adventure credentials as a military parachutist and frogman.
While working for the necessary qualifications to get into the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, he had had a serious motorbike accident. He was very lucky to survive at all and was in hospital for nine months. He made an almost complete recovery but had lost some mobility in his limbs and this was sufficient to stop him getting through the army medical tests. The trauma of the accident with the accompanying physical pain, enforced immobility and fears for the future proved an important turning point in his life. He had had a happy childhood with a close-knit family background in which a Christian belief had played an important part; the accident had strengthened his belief, directing it into a positive evangelistic conviction which was to form the main stream of his life. With a strong sense of gratitude for the medical skill that had saved him, he resolved to devote his life to medicine and thought initially in terms of studying to be a male nurse. It was his father who gave him the necessary encouragement and financial backing to get the A levels he needed to gain a place at medical college, become a doctor and eventually join the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Wally had never seen the need to have a doctor on the expedition. Of the applicants, he favoured a seasoned Antarctic man, who was also a geophysicist, called Geoff Renner. With the same background as the other three, he knew and understood polar life and travel. But Wally was overruled partly, I suspect, because he did not put over his own views strongly enough, always having been in awe of the polar establishment on his Committee. He told me:
‘It was easier for Fuchs. He was very much older than I at the time he did his trans-Antarctic crossing, and had a certain authority and charisma through having been the Director of the British Antarctic Survey. He could say, “Right, now look here gentlemen we’ll do it this way”, and they would listen and go along with it. But I couldn’t do that. Possibly it was my training from Dad; I had a kind of awe and respect for age, prestige, position and title. I felt that I had to call them Sir. One or two of them called me Wally occasionally, but it sometimes seemed to stick in their throats. They were absolutely charming and very helpful, but there was this very strange sort of relationship I had with them.’
So Wally went along with the Committee’s preference for Ken Hedges who, but for his complete lack of polar experience, seemed a tough and pleasant personality. They first met in a London pub. Wally remembers how he spent the entire interview trying to describe to Ken just what polar travel and living was like and, as a result, he hardly asked Ken anything at all, discovering very little about his background and interests.
There was little enough time to balance out the question of team composition anyway. With so many things to do and Wally scurrying between his parents’ home in Warwickshire and his office in London, it was still very much a one-man band. Ken Hedges and Allan Gill were due to fly out by RAF Hercules transport plane with the bulk of the gear, first to Thule to collect the dogs, and then on to Point Barrow at the end of December. Wally was going to fly out direct to meet them there in early January 1968. Anna Koerner’s baby was due towards the end of January and Fritz was determined to be with her at the birth and make sure everything was all right before leaving her for sixteen months. This didn’t suit the Committee and Fritz and Anna were brought over to London to discuss the problem. Fritz remembers the incident vividly.
‘The Committee said: “You must leave on the dot.” We went on to discuss this and the discussion got down to the birth being induced. I can remember the exact words Old Smiler (that’s what we called Sir Miles Clifford) said: “I think it’s a good idea. You don’t mind having the child induced, do you, Anna?” Anna was just looking at them, amazed, and they were all sitting there, puffing on their pipes.’
Wally flew out of England on 10 January and joined his party at Point Barrow a few days later. Point Barrow is like so many Arctic stations, a collection of huts and hangars jutting out of the empty, snow-covered tundra. Their 70,000 pounds of supplies, sledges, tents, food for men and dogs, were stored in a big warehouse. Ken Hedges had certainly been plunged in at the deep end, having already driven a dog team seventy miles in the pitch dark and cold of mid-winter from Qanaq to the US Air Force Base at Thule. It was the first time he had ever handled dogs or been exposed to such extreme cold. The next weeks were spent in frantic preparation. Dog harnesses were adjusted and restitched by the Eskimo women, sledges and tents were checked, radios tested. The supplies which were going to be air-dropped by the Canadian Air Force had to be sorted out. They made short journeys over the ice to try out the gear and train the dog teams and all the time, out there to the north, was the vast stretch of ice covering the Arctic Ocean – implacable, huge, menacing. They were not yet a complete team, but Fritz Koerner’s daughter arrived, by natural birth, on 31 January; Fritz was at Point Barrow by 8 February and, at last, they were ready to set out.
The overall plan was to put in as much sledging progress across the polar pack ice before the summer melt made travel impossible. Then for two months they would camp on a suitably substantial floe which would itself continue creeping on towards the Pole in the circular polar drift. In the autumn they would sledge on again until the four months of winter darkness obliged them to set up camp once more; then with the spring would come the last frantic dash for Spitsbergen before the ice broke up beneath them.
The first and perhaps most difficult problem of the entire journey was to find a way of crossing the eighty-mile belt of fractured young ice between the Point Barrow coast and the relative solidity of the polar pack ice. This was a region of shifting currents, where the great ice floes were ground together against the immovable land mass, an area of piled up, ever moving pressure ridges, of changing leads of open water. Day after day Wally flew over it in a Cessna 180, but what he saw was never encouraging. There was no sign of the ice compressing to form the vital bridge they needed and, as the days slipped by the tension increased. Back in London the media printed stories of gloom and doom, while the worries of the Committee could almost be felt over the radio waves.
At last, on 22 February, the ice bridge to the polar pack seemed at least feasible, and the four set out with their dog teams and sledges, along the coastline and then out on to the piled rubble of ice that marked the edge of the Arctic Ocean. For the next eighteen months they would be travelling across the constantly shifting ice, which would rarely be more than six or seven feet thick and which could split beneath them at any moment. The dash for the relatively stable pack ice foundered into a laborious crawl almost immediately, their way barred by the first pressure ridge, a twenty-foot-high wall of ice blocks. They scrambled up to get a wider view. What they saw was discouraging.
‘As far as the eye could see there was chaos – no way seemed possible except the route by which we had come. It was like a city razed to the ground by a blitz or an act of God, an alabaster city so smashed that no landmarks remained. It was a desolate scene, purified by a covering of snow that had been packed down by the wind; dazzling bright yet horrifying.’
The only way to get through was to cut down the walls of ice, using the debris to build ramps for the sledges to be heaved or pushed across and down into the rut beyond. It was –41 °C, but their clothes were soon damp with sweat, a dampness that would turn into a bitter chill as soon as they stopped their exertion. And then, once they had forced the first ridge, there was another, another and yet another. There was mush ice, which was just particles jumbled together, barely fused by the pressure of the floes on either side, only a few inches thick, a quaking bog with thousands of feet of black, sub-zero waters beneath. They skeetered across these sections, the dogs scrambling, yapping frantically, the men shuffling, striding, fearful of the easily imagined horrors of immersion in the waters below. There was little rest at night with the constant groaning of the ice and the fear of it splitting beneath the tents. And there was the even greater fear of disgrace and ridicule. What if they couldn’t break through to the pack ice beyond? They would have to return to face the waiting media, the sceptics who said they had no chance anyway. They were all frightened, but the fear of failure and of ridicule was greater than that of death. It was the same feeling that Heyerdahl had had as Kon-Tiki limped painfully from the coast of Peru.
Doggedly they fought their way from floe to floe, edging northwards whenever possible, though they were also at the mercy of the winds and currents which were sweeping the ice they were crossing steadily towards open waters. After sixteen days of struggle, they were only seventeen miles from Point Barrow. At this stage they were travelling light, carrying only a few days’ food and relying on being resupplied by the Cessna, whose pilot also tried to advise them on the terrain lying ahead. For most of the time his information was discouraging. They were now 400 miles behind schedule. This was serious, since they needed to be in the right place by the height of summer to find a suitably large ice floe on which to drift through the summer months towards the Pole. If they were forced to stop short of their planned destination, they would be in the wrong region of drift and could be swept away to one side of the Pole. Wally, therefore, resolved to keep sledging well into the summer, even though this would mean more problems with open leads between the ice floes. He had anticipated this and had designed the sledges so that they could be turned into boats for crossing short stretches of open water.
By 20 March they had at last broken through the coastal fracture zone and were on the permanent polar pack ice. There were still pressure ridges to cross, open leads to negotiate, but their progress was now very much faster. They were making sixteen or seventeen miles in a day. But they were now increasingly confronted with another problem. There were seams within the fragile unity of the group, the beginnings of a division into three and one, and Ken Hedges was becoming the odd man out. Wally wrote:
‘Kens problems were social; physically he was in good shape, professionally he was admired and encouraged by his regiment for joining the expedition, but it was inevitable that the difference in training and temperament would set him apart from the three of us.
‘Ken was a good officer, a Christian and a gentleman. We were three seasoned polar men. The many years we had lived in isolated polar camps had left their mark on us; we would no doubt be regarded by a genteel society as rough, crude, self-reliant and irreligious. We were obsessed by and in love with the polar setting and the hard physical challenge of polar exploration. We were old friends; Allan and I had made a tough journey together the previous year; Allan and Fritz had made others; the three of us had gone through the same basic polar training at the same Antarctic base – Hope Bay. There was a close bond between us, a mutual trust and respect; we spoke the same language. Only a man with precisely the same background would have fitted instantly into such a society; it was therefore no surprise to us that Ken had felt alien at the start of the journey; but it had been worrying us for some time that he did not appear to be slipping naturally into our way of life.’
In any enclosed community little idiosyncrasies can become a savage irritant, and the way a person scratches his nose, stresses certain syllables or gulps his tea can become a quite irrational focus to externalise much deeper and more serious differences. The most obvious difference between Ken and the others was more than a mere mannerism. It was his religious belief, but this seems to have focused all the other differences of experience and background into something that was easily definable, and indeed mentioned to me by each of the others. Ken was a devout Baptist, the other three either atheist or agnostic. They found Ken difficult to live with. Little things would grate, like the way he would often go off to pray or meditate on top of a nearby pressure ridge – ’humbling’ the others called it, because of the characteristic stance he adopted, or the meek yet impenetrable front which they felt he put up between them in all arguments. It was a rift which was only to get wider as the months passed, driving Ken even further in on himself. Wally writes: ‘Ken, by his own admission, was unhappy in our society because he felt we were not “bringing him in”, and there was little we could do to improve the situation, for as far as we were concerned we had tried to interest him in our way of life and evidently failed.’
Their daily routine did nothing to alleviate Ken’s feeling of isolation. For a start, they each had their own dog team and through the day travelled separately, often hundreds of yards apart. The only time they came together was at an obstacle and, even here, Ken must have been forced anew to face the difference between himself and the others as the three polar experts pooled their knowledge and experience to manoeuvre a sledge over a pressure ridge or across an open lead. It was inevitable that Ken remained an onlooker, however willing he may have been to take an active part.
When I went to see him, he did not want to talk about the differences that occurred between himself and the other three; he did observe, however:
‘We didn’t meet as a team until a week before we set out and so there was no fellowship in that team. There was among the other three because they had all sledged together, but, as a team, in which twenty-five per cent was new, meaning myself, there was not that sense of fellowship. I didn’t have this sense of friendship, facing the fifty-fifty chance of dying, which is how I rated our chances. I was carried along by several conceptions; one was of acquitting myself as honourably as circumstances permitted, coming from the SAS and being a commissioned officer; also, there was this vague sense of British history, particularly in its polar sense. There was an absolute dedication and I put my life on the line on this one. I would endeavour to commit myself with honour, come what may and just hope that I wouldn’t have to pay the full price. There was a sense of resignation about it all.’
It was also very frightening; Wally Herbert described it for me:
‘We were all shit scared in our own desperate sort of ways to come through this period and each of the four men had their own way of handling this situation. We’d been in the Antarctic and Arctic in many dangerous situations; we’d experienced the dark before, but to Ken it was new and he was cold, he was uncomfortable; he was afraid as we all were, but for him it was new and so presumably for him it was very much more frightening.’
And there was also the dog team. This was what Ken found the most difficult. Much of polar living and travel is simple, basic survival, of getting used to putting up a tent in a blizzard, of struggling with a Primus stove, of plodding over mile upon mile of featureless ice, but managing a dog team is a real skill and one that needs years of experience to master fully. The other three had all driven dog teams in the Antarctic and the previous year Wally and Allan had gained further experience, but Ken had to learn from scratch. Essentially a kind man, he found it difficult to discipline his team in the way to which they were accustomed. He told me:
‘I wasn’t driving my dogs; I was walking out in front of them, whistling to the silly creatures to follow me, which they did. I remember Fritz saying to me, “Come on, Ken, you know you can’t walk across the Arctic like this. You’ll have to learn sooner or later to drive from behind rather than lead from the front.” Eventually I did, though I don’t rate myself a masterful sledge driver by any manner of means.’
As spring crept into summer, with its eternal, glaring daylight, the going became harder, with more and more open leads to find their way through. Everything was wet with snow – a watery quagmire, the ice increasingly mushy, their sleeping bags perpetually damp, their rucksacks soaked through, the tents a soggy mess. There was the growing worry of whether they could find a sufficiently large and solid floe on which to drift through the summer into the following autumn when, once again, they would be able to resume their progress. They had sledged 1,180 miles over the polar pack ice – further from land than any other polar traveller; at the same time they had managed to carry out some scientific work. Each day Fritz had contrived to measure the floe thickness and snow density. They had seen the tracks of the Arctic fox and polar bear, but they had actually seen only twelve seals, four gulls, a little auk, a flight of duck and two long-tailed jaegers in the five months they had spent in this icy wilderness. Some Arctic explorers had theorised that you could survive by hunting in the Arctic Ocean, but Wally’s team would have gone very hungry on what they had observed and certainly could not have fed the dogs!
This was becoming a disturbingly relevant topic, for the little radio – their only link with the outside world – had developed a fault. Without it they would be unable to guide in the supply aircraft, and it was unlikely that they could be found without an exact fix on their location. After two days’ nerve-wracking struggle they managed to discover the fault, a broken wire coming in from the power source. A day later they had a glimpse of the sun through the clouds, made a fix and were able to radio their position.
They had now reached their destination for the summer, a large and solid-looking floe that seemed as if it would survive both the long summer melt and any battering the seas might give it. On 12 July a Canadian Air Force Hercules brought their supplies for the summer – food, fuel, replacement clothing, tentage and scientific instruments for Fritz Koerner’s research programme. For a few weeks, until the ice hardened up once again, they could relax, relying on the constant drift of the current to carry them towards the Pole. Although relatively warm, with the temperature just above freezing, it was misty, miserable, very humid and they saw the sun through a screen of drizzle. There was always some tension. Would the floe survive through the summer; It had already split once, only 300 feet from the little village of tents the press had named Meltville. On another day, one of the very few fine, cloudless days they had, their floe was invaded by a polar bear and its two cubs. Alerted by the yapping and snarling of the dogs, they had no choice but to kill the bears before the dogs were killed or scattered. Ken Hedges had grabbed a rifle, but it jammed and it was Wally who shot the bear and cubs. They were all shocked by the incident but Ken particularly so, both because of the failure of his rifle and also by the necessity for killing these magnificent, beautiful yet deadly animals.
They were still behind schedule and Wally wanted to start out again as early as possible to try to make some more progress across the floes before the arrival of winter. When they set out on 4 September, the temperature had dropped to below freezing – but only just. The surface of the slushy snow covering the ice was frozen into a thin crust which broke at almost every step and they sank through to their knees into the icy, soggy mush. At the cost of constant, exhausting effort they were making only two miles or so a day. Everything was wet and their way was forever barred by open leads between the floes. Inevitably, tempers were short and the stress within the group came closer and closer to the surface. After Fritz had a blazing row with Ken over tactics, he and Wally talked over the problem:
‘Once again, we found ourselves talking about the relationship between Ken and the rest of the party – which was clearly strained. The incompatibility did not manifest itself in dramatic outbursts but in a deep and nagging disapproval of each other’s ideas and ideals. It was like a marriage that had failed in spite of efforts on both sides to make a go of it. The big question, not unlike the married couple’s, was whether to put an end to the relationship before the winter set in [Ken could be sent out on a light aircraft which would attempt to land about 25 September to bring in some delicate scientific instruments], or whether out of respect for the institution of “the polar expedition” (as with couples who respect the institution of matrimony), we should stick it out to the end. Both Allan and Fritz felt Ken should be sent out. To Ken, a devout man, forgiveness and reconciliation were not only basic principles of his faith but a solution he considered dignified and honourable. While I agreed with Allan and Fritz, I felt bound as leader of the expedition to give Ken the opportunity to see the expedition through to the end for his own sake and for the sake of those whom, in a sense, he represented.’
At least three of them could, on occasion, talk it out among themselves with a sense of unity, but it must have been much more difficult for Ken who inevitably felt totally isolated and must have sensed that the others were talking behind his back.
But the struggle went on; their way was now barred by a strip of mush ice about 200 feet wide at its narrowest point. It was a jumble of everything from ten-foot blocks to a porridge-like mush, held together only by the pressure of the two big floes on either side. The nightmare thought was of being caught in the middle of the strip when the pressure from the two floes was released. Should they drift apart only a few feet, the larger blocks would capsize and plunge, the mush would dissipate and dogs, sledges and men would be struggling in the heaving, tumbling sea. Wally and Fritz had gone ahead to find a way over the strip, but it was too wide, too chaotic. Discouraged, they returned to be confronted by an even greater crisis.
Allan was sitting, huddled in the snow, beside his sledge, his face contorted in agony. The previous day he had pulled a muscle in his back, but this was something which was obviously very much worse. He was unable to move and in extreme pain. Quickly, they erected a tent and somehow manoeuvred him into it. Ken diagnosed that Allan had either badly slipped a disc or torn a muscle and gave him a morphine injection. Whichever it was, it was essential to get him evacuated as soon as possible, but before that could be done they had to find somewhere safer to camp. They were on a very small floe that was already beginning to break up. Fritz and Wally went back to search for the floe on which they had spent the summer and had left only a few days before. It was only a few miles away and when they returned Ken reported that Allan’s condition had not improved. Wally sent out the first news of the accident stating: ‘If no miraculous recovery within next few days, will have to ask ARL to fly him out in the Cessna that brings the geophysical equipment. Need with the utmost urgency a replacement ex-Falkland Islands Dependency or ex-British Antarctic Survey geophysicist. Renner first choice.’
After a few days’ rest, Allan Gill was fit enough to be moved and they carried him, carefully strapped on to a sledge, back to the big floe on which they had spent the summer. But in these few days, as so often happens after any catastrophe, they were beginning to reassess the situation. Allan was feeling a little bit better. They were not going to be able to move now until after the winter. He could not come to much harm resting in their winter quarters and, if he did recover, he would be able to complete the journey with them after all. Wally and Fritz even concocted some other schemes. They had been trying to hand over their winter quarters, complete, to another research organisation, so that their scientific work could be carried on through the following summer. Should Allan be unfit to travel, he could stay on at the winter hut to run the scientific programme with Ken Hedges to look after him. This would free Wally and Fritz for their dash to Spitsbergen. Plans floated back and forth in their tiny microcosm but they were also linked to the big, outside world, were dependent on it for supplies and the winter hut, and unfortunately had already involved their Committee, 6,000 miles away in London, in the decision making.
Wally now told Ken Hedges that they had decided that Allan would stay for the winter; there was no need for him to be lifted out straight away, but Ken thought differently, pointing out that Allan needed hospital treatment if he were not to risk suffering for years from a weak back. He could even be crippled for life. Ken was not moved by Allan’s plea that he was prepared to take the risk and stated that if Wally ignored his advice he would have no other choice but to resign from the expedition, though he would remain with Allan to care for him as long as he was on the ice.
It was a stalemate. It was also another crisis both for the expedition and for Ken. This was the first occasion when his own expertise had been needed, and the other three had rejected it. One can sympathise with and understand both stances. As so often happens, there was no clearly right course to take, but it certainly accentuated the split within the expedition still further. If Ken had felt isolated before, it was very much worse now. Ken gave Wally his medical report on Allan, addressed to the Commandant of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and asked him to send it out. The following day Wally sent out his own assessment of the situation to the Committee, recommending that Allan Gill should be allowed to stay through the winter and be evacuated the following spring, should this still be necessary. A few days went by and then the fatal message arrived: ‘While recognising Allan’s great wish to winter, we regretfully decided that on medical grounds and to enable earliest possible start next spring, he must, repeat must, be evacuated in Phipps’ plane. A three-man party is regarded as the minimum acceptable risk, therefore Wally, Ken and Fritz to winter and complete journey.’
Wally was furious. In effect, the Committee, sitting in a cosy London office all those thousands of miles away, were taking over the command of the expedition and making operational decisions over his head. Confronted by the two conflicting opinions on the fitness of a member of the team, the Committee had to act as arbiter and had no real choice but to back the medical opinion, inevitably supported by the Commandant of the RAMC, against the opinion of the expedition leader. Wally described the impact their judgement made on him:
‘Ken was with me at the time the message came through. I read it out with difficulty for the words stuck in my throat ... Ken went back ahead of me to the tent where Allan and Fritz were having a brew; I walked around for a while trying to get a grip on what I suppose was a mixture of anger and the deepest personal sympathy for my old sledging companion. I crawled through the tent and squatted on a box at the foot of Ken’s bed. Allan and Fritz looked up expectantly.
"You’ve shot your bolt, mate. They want you out.”’
It is not surprising that Wally exploded that night over the radio to Squadron Leader Freddie Church, their communications linkman at Point Barrow. They used to chat for half an hour each day on a seldom-used frequency, and Wally had come to treat it as a direct, private conversation which must have been an important therapeutic release for him. Now, speaking about the Committee’s decision, Wally said into the microphone, ‘They don’t know what the bloody hell they are talking about’. It was the exasperated outburst that any of us might have made to a close friend, knowing that it would go no further. But Peter Dunn, the Sunday Times correspondent who was covering the story, had made quite sure that he, also, was in the little radio shack that day. Freddie Church had had no chance to warm Wally of this and Peter Dunn heard the entire outburst. Freddie tried to persuade Peter Dunn that this was confidential, that it could destroy Wally’s career if his remarks were publicised, but Dunn, the newsman, was adamant. Someone else could have been listening in to the conversation and to protect himself with his own paper he had to send the story out. He did so, with an embargo that it should not be published without his clearance. The cable arrived in London on the Monday, when the staff of Sunday papers take a rest day. But the duty sub-editor, recognising it was hot news, passed it on to The Times – but left out Peter Dunn’s embargo. The newsdesk of The Times immediately saw it as a headline scoop and had it set up for the following day’s paper. It was only just before going to print that editor, William Rees-Mogg, felt he should warn Wally’s Committee what he was doing. He phoned Sir Miles Clifford first, but he was out of the country. He then phoned Sir Vivian Fuchs, the deputy Chairman. Fuchs was appalled that this had been leaked to the press and even threatened The Times with an injunction, but Rees-Mogg responded, quoting their right to publish anything they wanted about the expedition – and did so. Up to this moment the rest of the media had taken comparatively little interest in the expedition but now, with a big juicy scandal, they seized upon the story, besieging Fuchs and the other members of the Committee for an explanation. Caught off-balance, anxious to justify their actions, the Committee muttered about Wally Herbert suffering from ‘winteritis’ – a condition of isolation and stress that can cloud judgement and become a danger to all concerned.
But the expedition had to go on. They were now due to have an airdrop of the prefabricated hut and all their supplies for the winter. This came in on time. But Wally was determined to keep Allan with them if he possibly could and luckily for him the smooth, new ice around them was undoubtedly on the thin side for a light plane to land. Very soon it would be too dark. So ice and weather conditions collaborated to prevent the plane landing and, in the meantime, Allan Gill was showing positive signs of recovery, hobbling around the camp and doing his best to help in the day-to-day work wherever he could. The autumn progress had been negligible. In the eight days they had been moving they had covered only six and a half miles. They were now 240 miles short of the scheduled wintering place, but even so they set to and started to prepare themselves for the winter, assembling the little hut, building primitive furniture and preparing the various scientific programmes they planned to pursue – while the floe on which they were living would, they hoped, drift steadily closer to the North Pole.
They were faced with six months of immobility, much of the time in total darkness, squeezed into a tiny hut whose floor space was about fifteen feet square. Each man had his own little area. Ken built a nook of shelves around his bed, with a blanket to give himself some privacy; he was to disappear behind it, into his own little world, for days on end, coming out only to relieve his bodily functions. Wally built a packing-case desk on which he could work on his reports and the book he would have to produce at the end of the expedition, while Fritz had an area devoted to his scientific work. Allan opted for sleeping throughout the winter outside in one of the tents, where it was bitterly cold, but at least he could get away from the tension of that tiny hut.
There was external stress as well. On 20 November, when they were plunged in perpetual darkness, the floe cracked only 250 feet from the hut, between them and some of the supply dumps they had laid out scattered over the floe. They could hear the cracking and groaning of the ice, interspersed with staccato cracks, as the floes jostled and ground against each other in the black night. Picking their way across their floe by the light of hurricane lanterns, they saw that what had been a substantial island was now reduced to one half a mile long and only 800 feet wide. Wally and Fritz set out with dog teams and found a more substantial home for the rest of the winter about two miles away. The next few days were spent in relaying their twenty-seven tons of food, fuel, other supplies and, finally, the prefabricated hut to the site of their new home, all this in the dark, in temperatures of around –35 °C.
And then back to the routine of scientific work for ten hours a day – of cooking and washing up, of reading and sleeping, all in the unchanging dark and cold. Added to the stress of their uneven relationship was the worry of whether they would be able to complete their journey at all; they were so far behind their schedule, so far from the North Pole, let alone from Spitsbergen. Allan Gill exercised quietly, slowly building up his mobility and strengthening his back. He was determined to finish the course if he possibly could. Ken Hedges, isolated and now in a profound depression created by a near-insufferable situation, was still equally determined to complete the expedition.
At this stage Fritz Koerner was probably the least unhappy member, for he was totally involved in a massive scientific programme, too extensive for one man to carry out. He was working flat out throughout the winter, going out in all weathers to check his instruments, exercising at the same time both himself and his dog team, working for hours over his figures and snatching the minimum of sleep.
They had relied on drifting steadily towards the Pole, but their star shots showed that the progress was more of an erratic zigzag. Yet through the winter they did slowly drift closer to their goal. And, as the winter slipped by, they started preparing for their journey the following spring. Wally built a snow house out of blocks in which each one of them worked on his own new sledge which had been dropped in with all the other supplies, strengthening the framework, sewing harnesses and making sure that everything was ready for their dash to Spitsbergen.
There were still plans to fly Allan Gill out in the early spring and Geoff Renner had been brought to Point Barrow to replace him. Wally was quietly determined, however, to hang on to Allan if he possibly could. He wanted to set out from his winter quarters on 25 February, still in the dark and cold of winter, to give them the maximum time to make the journey all the way to Spitsbergen. They were almost ready to go, the sledges part-packed on the 24th, when the seas decided for them. Suddenly the ice around them began to erupt in a terrifying icequake, splitting and breaking all around the hut. It was time to get out – fast. They finished packing, scrambled over opening leads to rescue dogs and loads and, still in the dark in temperatures of around –43 °C, set out on the last, and by far the longest, leg of their journey. They were carrying not only the food and supplies they were going to need in the next few months but also a huge load of scientific instruments and specimens, the fruits of Fritz Koerner’s work from the previous summer and all that winter.
The journey to the Pole was even more fierce than the previous year. It was bitterly cold, with temperatures down to –50 °C. Even in the depths of winter the ice was no less active, heaving into rippling pressure ridges, breaking up into leads of black waters – even blacker than the sky above. They froze over in moments, but there was always the fear of the fresh ice breaking. They kept going for eight hours at a time; that was as much as they could manage in the bitter cold. Sometimes they only made a couple of miles, the broken ice was so bad. And it went on day after day, as they slowly clawed their way towards the Pole. They saw little of each other during the day. It was usually Fritz out in front, with Wally taking up the rear to give Ken, or anyone else, a helping hand. Allan Gill was usually just behind Fritz and would slip into the lead whenever he had a chance, though he was not meant to go out in front. Ken was nearly always in third position, infinitely methodical and careful in the way he packed his sledge, but travelling through the day in what seemed to Fritz a dream.
There were moments of great beauty as well as excitement and danger. Wally wrote: ‘On 12 March we saw the sun for the first time since 6 October. It was a blood-red, beautiful sight after five months and seven days – a living, pulsating thing it seemed to be, slowly drifting on a sea stained red with the blood it released.’
A few days later Wally, bringing up the rear, realised that he was being followed by a polar bear. His rifle was not loaded and the few rounds of ammunition he always carried were in the pocket of an anorak stuffed into the front of the sledge out of his reach. The bear was rapidly overtaking the sledge as Wally crawled along the top, screaming at the dogs to keep going, and dug out the anorak. By the time he had loaded his rifle the bear was only 150 feet away; he raised the rifle and pulled the trigger, but it had jammed in the cold. The bear was closing fast. In desperation Wally slapped the bolt with the palm of his hand; the rifle fired, sending a shot up into the air, but it was enough to alarm the bear which ambled away behind some ice blocks. This was just a few miles from the Pole.
Allan was still due to be flown out once a plane could land near them; this was still a constant course of irritation within the party and Fritz, who was sharing a tent with Ken Hedges, had some blazing arguments on the subject. Not only was Wally trying to find every possible means of postponing a landing, but Fritz also had a feeling that Weldy Phipps, the pilot who was meant to fly in, was quietly conspiring to help Allan Gill remain with the crossing party by finding various excuses for not coming. And so, as the sun slowly crept up into the sky Allan who was by far the toughest and most attuned to this environment – in Wally’s words ‘the emotional anchorman of the party’ – stayed on with the expedition.
On 5 April Wally calculated that they had, at last, reached the Pole. It looked like any other bit of ice, anywhere in the Arctic Ocean, but this was it – the very top of the world. Immediately Wally sent a message to the Queen to announce their achievement. And then, a few moments later, Allan Gill, who had also been calculating the results, poked his head into the tent to announce that he thought they might be seven miles short. There followed an exhausting hide and seek game in slow motion, as they tried to find this elusive point. It took them another twenty hours of hard sledging before they finally satisfied themselves that they had truly reached it. Wally described the moment:
‘It had been an elusive spot to find and fix – the North Pole, where two separate sets of meridians meet and all directions are south. Trying to set foot upon it had been like trying to step on the shadow of a bird that was hovering overhead, for the surface across which we were moving was itself a moving surface on a planet that was spinning about an axis beneath our feet. We were dog tired and hungry. Too tired to celebrate our arrival on the summit of this super-mountain around which the sun circles almost as though stuck in a groove.’
One cannot help wondering if Cook or Peary hadn’t fudged their calculations when standing exhausted in this featureless, shifting expanse of sea-borne ice some sixty years before. The Pole had, however, been reached overland the previous year, when Ralph Plaisted and his party drove their Skidoos from the region of Ellesmere Island, but then they had been flown back to the safety of land. That same summer of 1968, Roger Tufft, who had withdrawn from Wally’s expedition, had joined up with Hugh and Myrtle Simpson, a husband and wife team who combined science with polar and mountain adventures. They had tried to reach the Pole on skis, hauling their sledges and carrying all their food with them to be independent of airdrops. It was a simple, lightweight venture that had appealed to Roger. But the initial rough ice had been too difficult, their gear inadequate, and they had been forced to abandon their attempt.
Wally’s team were undoubtedly on the Pole; they had spent twenty-four precious hours making sure. They put the camera on a tripod and took a delayed-action shot of themselves standing, statuesque in their furs, by a laden sledge and an unfurled Union Jack. The picture has a nostalgic, slightly sad quality about it. It could have been taken sixty years before; the furs, the sledge, the bearded frosted figures would have looked just the same.
The journey was by no means over but at least they were now making some fast times, the four sledges stretched out over several miles, following in each other’s tracks, heading ever southwards towards Spitsbergen. It became something of a mad gallop. Fritz Koerner remembers:
‘You’d make a frantic dash in the morning to get off first because whoever was off first led. It was quite childish really. It was a mad rush to pack. Allan and I would just bundle everything into a couple of tarpaulins, chuck them into the sledges and then go like hell to the other side of the first pressure ridge, where we would pack things a bit better and then tear off again, to make sure that we were first. Wally and Ken were much more methodical. Wally even had a special place for his ice axe, though I think Ken was the most efficient of all.
‘Once out in front, you’d stay there all day. Allan wasn’t meant to lead, because of his back, but every now and then he’d catch me up and he’d say, “Look, Uncle Ben’s out of the way, what if I lead for a bit?” We called Ken Uncle Ben – the very fact that we had a different name for him showed that he was away from us. And I’d say, “Sure”. And away he’d go.
‘Then Wally would come up at the end of the day and he’d quietly say, “Allan led a bit, didn’t he?” And I’d say, “How the bloody hell did you know?” “Oh, I noticed the tracks curling round the other set.”’
They were all tired, underfed and stretched to the limit, both physically and mentally. It was a race with the summer melt, for they had to reach solid land before the southern edges of the pack ice began to break and drift off into the Atlantic. There were plenty of crises to test them still further. The tent Allan and Fritz were sharing was burnt down one day, when they left the Primus stove unattended. The tent could be patched up, but Allan’s sleeping bag was badly damaged and most of his spare clothes destroyed. Ken Hedges very nearly lost his sledge and dogs when he tried to cross a wide lead. The others came up only just in time to rescue them. There was the constant threat of marauding polar bears, who became more numerous the further south they went. But the ice was very much smoother than it had been on the approach to the Pole and they were making good, fast progress. There were signs of land, an old tree trunk sticking out of an ice floe, seashells and moss on the surface of the ice, an increase in bird life.
Then, on 23 May, Wally saw some piled clouds on the distant horizon. They looked like the kind of clouds you would see above a mountain range. That evening he was able to pick out the exposed rocky peaks jutting up into the sky. They were very much at the end of their journey. But the ice floes were now beginning to break up, and there was a real risk of being swept out into the open sea before they could actually make a landfall. The frigate, HMS Endurance, had sailed up towards Spitsbergen to meet them and could always rescue them by helicopter, but this just would not have been the same. There now seemed little hope of reaching the shores of Spitsbergen, but there were some small islands just to the north and they decided to go for these.
No longer on the permanent pack ice, they were dodging from the haven of one small floe to the next, at the mercy of currents and wind, heading for Phipps Island, a little pile of barren rocks jutting out of the ice. To reach it they had to cross wide areas of broken mush ice, manoeuvring from ice block to ice block. It was probably the most dangerous moment of the entire journey. Wally described it:
‘Our route back to the floe was cut off. The whole floating mass of ice rubble was simmering like some vast cauldron of stew. We rushed from one sledge to another as each in turn jammed in the pressure, or lurched as the ice which was supporting it relaxed or heaved; at one point my sledge turned completely turtle and ran awkwardly over a six-foot drop from one block of ice to another.’
They spent a frightening, uncomfortable part of a night on a tiny floe. They had failed to reach Phipps Island and were being swept to the north, but there was an even smaller island in the path of their drift. On 29 May they were close enough to make a dash across the broken mush ice to the island. Fritz stayed behind on the floe, to keep an eye on the camp, and Wally gestured Allan and Ken to make a dash for the land. Wally wrote: ‘It was some moments before the full significance of what Allan and Ken had done got through to me and, when it did, it was through a small chunk of granite Ken pressed into my hand. “Brought you a small bit of the island,” he said.’
They had completed their crossing of the Arctic Ocean, without doubt one of the greatest and most exacting journeys ever made. They had been very dependent upon air support, but it is unlikely that they could have attempted the journey without it. In many ways, the stresses within the team and how each man somehow came through makes the achievement even more impressive. In the short period that the four had to wait for the helicopter to pick them up and take them back to that big, wide world, of receptions, press conferences and questions, Wally, as any leader would, desperately sought unity within the team, wanting the story of their achievement to have the weight and majesty it deserved as one of the great polar journeys of all time. There was a long and bitter argument over how much of their differences should be revealed but, finally, they all agreed to present a united front.
The helicopter from Endurance came sweeping in and hovered down on to their little ice floe. The captain of Endurance jumped out, shook hands with Wally and the rest of the team. The journey was over. The stress, depressions, despair and discomfort of the past fifteen months were now something of the past. In the wardroom of Endurance Ken was laughing and joking with the ship’s officers, providing a fund of amusing stories from the past months, most of which for him had been a nightmare. Allan Gill was already thinking of his next trip out into the empty wastes of the Arctic, while Fritz was absorbed by the vast mass of work he had in front of him from his scientific observations during the journey.
And Wally – this journey represented six years of hard, grinding effort, of solitary work and responsibility, of endless obstacles, many of which had seemed insuperable at the time. He had overcome them all. He had been successful. But success is so very ephemeral and, for Wally, that success was tainted. Somehow, the achievement did not gain the recognition that he felt and I believe it most certainly did deserve.
In the early part of the century there was a huge, devouring interest in all things polar. The early polar explorers were international heroes whose names really were household words. In 1969, however, Wally Herbert’s journey across the top of the earth gained scant attention. It was the time of the moon shots. Apollo XI had gone into orbit round the moon only a few days before Wally made his landfall; Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon just a few weeks later. The media and the rest of the world, craning their necks into space and obsessed with fast-moving technology, hadn’t time to follow the slow, laborious movement of four men with their dog teams, across the top of their own planet.
It was only in the New Year’s Honours List for the new millennium that Wally Herbert’s huge achievement has been publicly recognised with a well-deserved knighthood. His journey remains the longest polar trek of all time.