In February 1952, the British supply ship John Biscoe steamed slowly into Hope Bay on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Ahead lay the remains of the burnt-out British base in which two men had died in November 1948. It stood as a testament to the ever-present danger of fire in the Antarctic. Britain had taken three years to muster the resources to return, only to find two supply ships lying at anchor and a scene of activity on shore. The Argentine navy had moved in and was building a base of its own.
Both Britain and Argentina regarded Hope Bay as an integral part of their territory, and each viewed the other as an interloper. With the Argentinians now the resident inhabitants, it was their turn to warn off the British. Such warnings had been given for a decade as formal assertions of sovereignty but had never been backed up with force. This time, though, as the British began shipping their stores ashore, an overenthusiastic Argentinian commander instructed that automatic guns be fired over the heads of the British landing party. The John Biscoe had no effective answer, and the men were forced to retreat back on board.1 The political theatre had taken a new and dangerous turn. A war in the Antarctic had become a real possibility.
News of the Argentine action was flashed to the Falklands governor, Sir Miles Clifford, a former Royal Marine who had served as an official in different parts of Britain’s empire. The gruff governor was a staunch defender of British sovereignty in far-off places, and he was not going to have the British expelled from this strategic point on the Antarctic Peninsula. After cabling the news to the Colonial Office in London, Clifford and a party of Royal Marines bustled aboard the frigate HMS Burghead Bay, which had recently arrived at Stanley to act as a naval guard ship.
Without waiting for a reply from London, Clifford steamed to Hope Bay, about 1400 kilometres due south. Then, under the threatening shadow of the frigate’s guns, the marines went ashore to secure a landing place while the Argentinians retreated out of sight. It was all over before the government in London was able to react. A subsequent British protest to Buenos Aires brought an apology from the government of Juan Perón and the withdrawal of the Argentinian officer, but this did not end the ongoing tension between the two nations.2
The following summer, conflict erupted on Deception Island, on which there had been a British base since 1943 and an Argentine base since 1947, and which Chile regarded as its territory. During the resupply of the Argentine base in January 1953, the Argentine navy reinforced its country’s sovereignty by transporting ten tons of soil from Argentina, ostensibly for the garrison to grow vegetables. In fact, the soil was a symbolic gesture to show that Deception Island was an integral part of Argentina. Then, in a more provocative act, an Argentinian naval party erected a hut, a tent and a flagpole on the airfield that had been constructed by explorer Hubert Wilkins in 1928, which was within a few hundred metres of the six-man British base. At the same time, Chile announced plans to build a major airfield of its own on the island, and a Chilean party countered the Argentinians by erecting a hut near the British base and by painting ‘Chile’ in white letters on Wilkins’ airfield.
In the face of these challenges, Britain decided it must act while it still could. On 15 February, the frigate HMS Snipe arrived bearing the acting Falkland Islands governor, Colin Campbell, two police officers and fifteen Royal Marines. Ignoring the long-established Argentine base on the other side of the bay, they quickly confronted the two Argentinians at the new base, dismantling their hut and tent and arresting the pair and deporting them on board the Snipe. The unoccupied Chilean hut was also dismantled. When the British Foreign Office released news of the incident, there were protests in the Buenos Aires press and demonstrations in the streets about the ‘brutal English insult to our sovereignty’.3
Across the Atlantic, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was cheered by his supporters in the House of Commons when he declared that the action had been taken ‘to dispel any doubt about [the British] attitude toward encroachments of this type on British territory’. Amid laughter, he stressed that the two Argentinians had been ‘expelled not as invaders but as illegal immigrants’.
The British action did not stop the Argentinians from asserting their sovereignty. The following summer, Juan Perón sent air force planes on daily flights over Deception Island to show that ‘Argentina exercised sovereignty over Antarctic skies’. He also established an air force base on Dundee Island, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Upping the ante still further, Argentinian navy minister Rear Admiral Anibal Olivieri in February 1954 went on an inspection tour of all the naval bases in ‘Argentine Antarctica’. Forewarned, Britain sent the frigate HMS St Austell Bay to intercept the Argentine ship as it arrived off Deception Island, only to be signalled by the Argentinians, ‘Welcome to Argentina.’ When the ships came to anchor and a British officer went aboard the Argentine ship, he was told that ‘the frigate was in Argentinian territorial waters without authorization’. Olivieri completed his tour by landing a military detachment at Hope Bay to strengthen the Argentinian naval personnel who had been set to flight by the Royal Marines in 1952.4
Despite Eden’s bravado, Britain was in a quandary. Hard-pressed financially, it was scaling back its imperial commitments around the world and reducing the size of its armed forces. It regarded its possession of the Falkland Islands as non-negotiable but had been willing to entertain the prospect of ceding most, if not all, of the Falkland Islands Dependencies to Argentina and/or Chile. However, there was a fear in London that giving way on the Falkland Islands Dependencies would be seen in Buenos Aires as a sign of weakness, and might lead to Argentina wresting away the Falkland Islands as well.
Little was done to resolve what seemed to be an intractable problem. Every base that Britain established in the Falkland Islands Dependencies was more than matched by the Argentinians and Chileans. By the summer of 1953–54, the British had six bases, while the Argentinians had eight and the Chileans had three.5 Britain did not have the naval force on hand to counter the South Americans. There was just one frigate based in the Falkland Islands Dependencies during the summer to provide token support for British sovereignty, and it was unable to go much further south than Deception Island for fear of the ice. Unable to dislodge its rivals, Britain had to defend its territorial title by other means. It would build more bases, do better science than its rivals, issue stamps for the Falkland Islands Dependencies and compile detailed maps covered mainly by British names.
In charge of Britain’s naming work in the Antarctic was the bespectacled ornithologist, Brian Roberts, who had been on the 1934 Graham Land expedition. He had since become the Antarctic specialist at the Foreign Office, while also working at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. During the war, he had led a small section at the Foreign Office devoted to researching the history of territorial claims in the Antarctic. It had compiled a secret report containing everything that was ‘relevant to the question of claims of sovereignty’, along with information on ‘the nature of the different territories and their value for different purposes’. Sent to policy-makers in Britain and the dominions, it was meant to inform discussions concerning Antarctica and to provide historical background for those attending the much-mooted but never held conference on Antarctic sovereignty. Not surprisingly, the evidence was organised in such a way as to provide support for Britain’s territorial claims.6 In the late 1940s, Roberts had become secretary of a British committee that liaised with the Americans to reach agreement on Antarctic names. The rotund and pipe-smoking Roberts was zealous about protecting Britain’s position in the Antarctic and had a strong belief in the power of names and maps to shore up territorial titles.
Although Roberts believed that placing British names on Antarctic maps was crucial to ensuring British possession, he realised that it was just as important to obtain international recognition of those names. Only then would British names be likely to appear on maps prepared by other nations. It might even be possible to produce a standard map of Antarctica that met general acceptance while still protecting British interests.
Since they were not territorial rivals, Britain and its Commonwealth countries were able to reach easy agreement on names in their respective territories. Norway was also ready to compromise, since its territory did not overlap with that of any other nation. The Falkland Islands Dependencies, and the Antarctic Peninsula in particular, was the most problematic area. There was little prospect of a compromise with Argentina and Chile, which were adamant about their ownership and had already replaced many British names. Britain concentrated instead on reaching agreement with nations whose explorers had been active in that region, recognising many foreign names based upon priority of discovery. Despite concern about Russian ambitions, even some of the names used by Bellingshausen in the South Shetlands were accepted. At the same time, however, Bellingshausen’s names that had not survived through usage were not shifted elsewhere within the Shetlands but were allowed to disappear. It was feared that doing otherwise might weaken Britain’s case for possession of the Shetlands.7
With little hope of reaching agreement with Argentina or Chile over the Antarctic Peninsula, Britain sought a compromise with the United States. Even that would not be easy, since the United States regarded itself, rather than Britain, as the area’s true discoverer. After all, Britain’s ‘Graham Land’ was America’s ‘Palmer Peninsula’. The vexed question of an overall name for the peninsula was set aside in favour of deciding names for its subsidiary features. In 1948, Roberts had been authorised by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee to correspond informally with his American counterpart, Captain Harold Saunders, in order to reach tentative agreement on these relatively minor names before they were submitted to their respective committees. Only after that had been done would they appear on both British and American maps, which should see them being accepted by some other nations as well.
Although both sides wanted to have the greatest scattering of their own names on the map, Roberts developed a productive relationship with Saunders. He had greater difficulties with some British officials who wanted discussions only after Britain had reached a firm view. In 1950, when Saunders and Roberts tried to arrange a meeting between members of their respective committees to reach final agreement on various names on the peninsula’s east coast, the British committee was so worried about being steamrolled by the Americans that they denied the meeting official status and shifted its location from London to Cambridge. Realising that nothing definite would come from such a meeting, the Americans cancelled it. The British officials were relieved and agreed that the compilation of a gazetteer of place names in the Falkland Islands Dependencies should be accelerated.8
Although Roberts was frustrated by the meeting’s cancellation, some of his colleagues on the committee feared that the slow process was playing into the hands of the Americans. The irascible Colonial Office representative, J. S. Bennett, mounted a furious assault on Roberts’ strategy, complaining of the delays it was causing in the production of maps, and the possible weakening of Britain’s title if it accepted some American names. Maps of British territory ‘should carry names only of British origin’, declared Bennett, who urged that the talks with Saunders ‘should be discontinued’ and ‘names should be inserted on published maps with all possible speed’.
The Foreign Office representative explained that Roberts’ approach was part of a larger strategy to cooperate with the Americans in the hope that it might help to resolve the fractious dispute with Argentina and Chile, and lead to the creation of ‘some form of international regime for the Antarctic continent’. The Admiralty’s Hydrographic Department also pointed to the importance of Britain’s Antarctic Pilot and the United States’ Sailing Directions for Antarctica having the same names on their maps. But Bennett would not be mollified, and cooperation with the Americans was suspended.9
In the event, Bennett was overruled and Roberts was authorised to resume his painstaking correspondence. By March 1953, he was able to report that nearly 150 published names had been rejected, mostly names given by Ronne following his return from Stonington Island in 1948. Another 172 names had been accepted, which meant that all the place name differences had been resolved as far south as 75° S.10
While Roberts and Saunders wrestled with Antarctic names, Britain pressed ahead with plans for an expedition to reinforce its territorial claims. Harking back to the past, it proposed to outshine its rivals with an expedition that would tackle the last great challenge. The proposal was suggested by Clifford, who was tired of being humiliated by the Argentinians and Chileans. He told the British government’s Polar Committee in March 1953 that a trans-Antarctic expedition was ‘the only way of competing successfully for political prestige in this area’. For some years, he had been pushing the idea of such an expedition, to be organised by the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey.
At the same time, the forty-five-year-old scientific head of Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, Dr Vivian Fuchs, had been planning his own dramatic crossing of Antarctica. It was the feat that Shackleton had tried but failed to achieve. Fuchs urged that Britain ‘seize the opportunity’ to do it soon, while its Antarctic rivals were not yet in as good a position to do ‘a journey of comparable importance’. If successful, a ‘trans-continental journey made wholly within territory claimed by the British Commonwealth’ would ‘bring world-wide prestige’, declared Fuchs.11 It would remind the world of Britain’s long history of exploration, and thereby implicitly reinforce their territorial title in the Antarctic. For a nation and empire on the skids, a successful expedition would also give a boost to national morale.
Fuchs put his proposal to the Polar Committee on 15 September 1953, where officials gave it a ‘ruthless examination’. There was little attempt by Fuchs to suggest that it would have much scientific value. He stressed instead its ‘romantic appeal’ and the effect it would have on the prestige of Britain and its Commonwealth partners. He also suggested that the establishment of British bases in Coats Land and the Ross Dependency ‘would help to justify territorial claims’. Neither the Admiralty nor the Department of Civil Aviation was willing to contribute funds, while even the Foreign Office was dubious about the expedition’s value.
As far as the Foreign Office was concerned, the Fuchs expedition might well have ‘prestige value’ but it ‘would not be sufficiently permanent to reinforce the British position’. If it was going to contribute funds, the Foreign Office wanted the money spent ‘at the fringe of the continent where the competition is greater’. Although Fuchs pointed out that the expedition would establish a base on the Ross Sea, where ‘lack of New Zealand activity’ had weakened its title to the Ross Dependency, British officials were wary about spending British money to reinforce the title to a territory under New Zealand administration.12
Britain was divided about the Antarctic. On the one hand, the yearly humiliation that it faced from the South Americans prompted the government to propose in August 1953 that there be ‘an orderly reduction’ in its Antarctic commitments until they reached a scale that the country was ‘in a position permanently to meet’.13 On the other hand, the conquest of Mount Everest by a British team in May 1953 had coincided with the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II, and the two events had imbued the British with the confidence that they might yet arrest their national decline. Just as Scott and Shackleton had performed acts of derring-do to convince a concerned nation that its long-held domination of the world was secure, now Fuchs was proposing to take up where Scott and Shackleton had left off.
Fuchs suggested that the expedition start either from Stonington Island on Marguerite Bay, where he had led a British base that had since closed and where an Argentine base was now located, or from Vahsel Bay on the Weddell Sea at the eastern extremity of the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Whatever the starting point, the end point would be McMurdo Sound on the Ross Sea, after the expedition had crossed parts of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, the Australian Antarctic Territory and New Zealand’s Ross Dependency. Beginning at Stonington Island had the advantage of countering the Argentine base and undermining the history of American activity, but it was the longer and more expensive option. When Argentina established a base at Vahsel Bay, the advantage of that route increased accordingly. Since it was cheaper and shorter, Fuchs ultimately opted to begin from there.14
The planned expedition, and the public discussion it provoked, seems to have convinced the British government to reverse its earlier decision for an ‘orderly reduction’ in its Antarctic commitments. By August 1954, it had decided instead to defend its position and increase its presence.15 For a decade Britain had not felt sufficiently confident to evict interlopers from its territory, nor had it regarded its Antarctic interests as sufficiently valuable to justify such action. Ever since 1949, Britain had renewed its annual agreement with Argentina and Chile not to send warships, other than on routine resupply cruises, south of 60° S.16 That had kept the sometimes uneasy peace, but it had also allowed the Argentinians to keep boosting their presence, confident in the knowledge that they would not be seriously challenged. So desperate was Britain that it even explored the idea of designating the Falkland Islands Dependencies ‘as a proving ground for work on atomic energy’. A study was made ‘of all operational, technical and safety aspects of using the South Polar Regions as a Proving Ground for testing H-bombs’.17 In the end, Britain decided that the deserts of Australia made a better testing ground than the ice of Antarctica.
The Admiralty now looked to its Falklands frigate to move beyond ‘flag-waving cruises’ that left ‘trespassers unmolested in British territory’. As First Lord of the Admiralty Jim Thomas explained to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in November 1954, making such cruises only ‘diminishes our prestige’ and might act as ‘a positive inducement to further trespass’. After giving the Argentinians so many warnings, wrote Thomas, Britain did not ‘need to give them any warning before impounding a hut and deporting its occupants’. Thomas confided to Defence Minister Harold Macmillan that the Admiralty had ‘always disliked the un-Navy-like job of pushing protests under the door of an Argentine hut’ and wanted its frigate ‘to act as a warship rather than an observation post or even a postman’. However, the Admiralty was concerned about sending it south into icy seas, where it might be trapped and have to suffer the ultimate indignity of relying for rescue on Argentina’s new German-built icebreaker, the General San Martin.18
Thomas suggested that the captain of the frigate be allowed to act against the Argentinians without having to refer the matter to London. While Eden wanted the frigate to take a much more active role, he did not want the captain taking unilateral action that could see the Foreign Office having to clean up the resulting diplomatic mess. The Colonial Office was much more gung-ho. The newly appointed governor of the Falkland Islands, Raynor Arthur, called for any new Argentine bases, or any summer bases converted into permanent bases, to be forcibly dismantled by the Royal Marines. Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd agreed ‘that the frigate should be used in the way most effective to deter Argentine and Chilean aggressions’, noting that Britain was facing ‘an Argentinian challenge which increases in scale every season’. He wanted the Admiralty to ‘take every opportunity, consistent with wise seamanship, in letting the intruders know that our frigate is about in these waters’.19 If a more aggressive policy was implemented, armed conflict could again become a real possibility. But such an aggressive policy could not be implemented in the face of trenchant opposition from the Foreign Office.
Eden’s concerns, and the failure by officials to agree on a policy for the frigate, led to a reconsideration of Britain’s Antarctic policy. The cabinet decision to increase British activities in the Antarctic had come up against the practical reality of a navy that had no ice-strengthened warships or icebreakers. As the Admiralty pointed out, the cabinet had ‘demanded increased activities but had made no provision for the finance or the facilities required to enable the activities to be carried out’. If the policy was to be implemented, the Admiralty suggested, Britain needed to build one settlement for each one built by the Argentinians, and construct at least two new ice-breaking supply ships. It would also have to commit sufficient warships to provide ‘moral and, if need be, other support to the ships or settlements’. Having a single frigate in the Falklands, which had to be kept out of the ice, was worse than useless, since it gave an impression of British weakness that encouraged the Argentinians to expand their presence. If its title was to be protected, Britain had to ‘adopt a more positive policy of exploration’, for which increased naval support would be required.20
The Antarctic was perhaps the least of Eden’s concerns in early 1955. For more than ten years, he had wanted to replace Churchill as leader of the Conservative Party. With the former wartime leader now eighty years old, Eden increased the pressure on Churchill, who finally announced his retirement in April 1955. The physical decline of Britain’s long-time leader and the political machinations that led to his replacement had compounded the indecision in London about the Antarctic. More fundamentally, Britain continued to have an imperial mindset long after it had lost the economic and military power to sustain an empire. Whereas Clement Attlee’s Labour government had in the late 1940s considered giving up much of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, Churchill’s government was much more reluctant to concede anything.
After the dispute over the use of the frigate, the British cabinet finally tried in February 1955 to reconcile its Antarctic ambition with its means. Eden informed his colleagues that Argentina was ‘forging ahead.’ At least six more huts were being erected and the base at Vahsel Bay was being established. Whereas the British had no aircraft and no icebreakers, Argentina had an icebreaker and thirteen aircraft to support its operations. Moreover, Eden warned, the Argentinians were ‘well equipped for survey and exploration work, and it is clear that they intend increasingly to strike out from their bases into the unexplored land mass’. He noted that Britain had ordered a new supply ship, which would allow more bases to be supported, and that it had contributed £100,000 to Fuchs’ Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Yet much more needed to be done.
For one thing, Roberts had long argued that it needed to do a ‘more systematic exploration and survey … to find out quickly what is most worth keeping’. That meant more bases and a civilian air and ground survey that would ‘discover more about the mineral and other potentialities’. In turn, this would mean having ‘sufficient force available in the Antarctic to support these activities’. Only the acquisition of an icebreaker and an ice-strengthened frigate would give Britain the capability ‘to send an armed party … to show the flag at British bases or take forcible action against intruders’. The weakness of Britain’s position was clear when Eden counselled his colleagues against any immediate use of force against Argentine bases. He feared that this would prompt retaliation against British bases that were beyond the protective reach of the present frigate.21
In late 1955, the vulnerable frigate was finally replaced by the HMS Protector, a twenty-year-old net-laying warship that had been specially strengthened for the ice and carried two helicopters. Armed with this new capability, the Foreign Office suggested that ‘some kind of aggressive action’ be mounted either to ‘overthrow one of two existing foreign bases and/or to forestall any foreign attempts to open new bases’. Although the Protector allowed greater scope to act ‘against Argentine and Chilean intruders’, the Admiralty was cautious about doing so unless it had more ships on hand. There was an added complication: the upcoming International Geophysical Year (IGY), scheduled for 1957–58, which required Britain to cooperate with other nations rather than fight with them.
So the question of aggressive action was passed to the Foreign and Colonial Offices for a report on the possible political repercussions, while the chiefs of staff examined the strategic implications. Although the Foreign Office thought it was ‘undignified’ for Britain to have its territory occupied by foreign powers, the chiefs of staff strongly advised against evicting the Argentinians. Britain simply did not have the means to do so without seriously weakening its forces elsewhere, and there was no strategic justification for it – so long as Britain retained control of the Falkland Islands. So the old policy continued. Britain established two new bases in the Falkland Islands Dependencies, initiated a privately chartered air survey of Graham Land and set up a base at Vahsel Bay for the Trans-Antarctic Expedition.22 Protecting Britain’s title was about to get much harder.
America had finally decided to reinforce its own rights to Antarctic territory, which included the territory claimed by Britain. Washington had repeatedly argued that only actual occupation gave a good title to Antarctic territory. Although it had held this position since 1924, the State Department was slow to act in regard to its own potential claims. Official American expeditions had twice gone to the Antarctic and established settlements at Little America and elsewhere, and had twice abandoned them. Britain, Argentina and Chile had since established permanent bases in the Antarctic, and they had been joined by France and Australia in the early 1950s. While all these bases were intended to reinforce the territorial claims of these nations, many other countries were intending to establish scientific bases as part of the activities planned by the International Council of Scientific Unions for the IGY. The prospect of non-claimant nations, particularly Russia, establishing bases lent a new urgency to the activities of claimant nations and to the deliberations of the United States. And once again it was marked by the bitter rivalry between Finn Ronne and Richard Byrd.
Ronne had been trying for more than four years to obtain government support for an expedition that would take him to the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. With many nations now organising IGY expeditions, Ronne proposed a way for Washington to pre-empt its rivals and for him to pre-empt the plans of Byrd. In February 1953, geographer Samuel Boggs arranged a meeting for Ronne with senior State Department officials.
Ronne told them of his plan to establish a base in Gould Bay on the Weddell Sea during the coming summer, along with outlying meteorological bases, including one at the South Pole. It would be much like his previous expedition, with a party of thirty-two staying for fourteen months to explore the interior of the continent and undertake scientific investigations approved by the National Academy of Sciences. Since they would complete their work prior to the IGY, the United States could formally annex much of the Antarctic before other nations arrived. Because the plan envisaged Ronne operating in an area claimed by both Britain and Argentina, he was anxious to have an assurance from the State Department that it had no political objections.23
Ronne’s plan had great appeal. Although the State Department acknowledged that ‘any expedition would increase tension with other interested powers’, its officials were prepared to take that risk because of the benefits it would bring in ‘its strengthening of United States rights in the area as a whole and its acquisition of scientific data unavailable anywhere else’. Officials were particularly attracted to the expedition area being ‘little known and away from the area of earlier U.S. explorations’, which would ‘expand the bases for any future U.S. claims’. It would thereby satisfy those officials ‘who foresee an eventual U.S. claim taking in the larger part of the Antarctic Continent’. However, it still remained a matter of contention in Washington as to whether the United States should seek to claim most of the Antarctic in the face of opposition from ‘friendly powers’, or whether it should limit its claims to those areas that had been intensively explored by American citizens. Although the State Department had decided in 1952 that a formal territorial claim should be made, opposition from the Defense Department meant that nothing had been done.24
Buoyed by the guarded approval of the State Department, Ronne proceeded to gather further support from members of Congress and the Department of Defense. However, the continuing war in Korea, together with active opposition from Byrd, ensured that the navy refused to commit any of its ships for Ronne’s expedition in the summer of 1953–54. Once the war had ended, Ronne returned to the fray. He went with Senator Frank Case to the White House in February 1954 to meet with administration officials, and came away confident that he would have President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s support.25
When nothing eventuated, he decided to pressure the president by having Case and Congressman Thor Tollefson introduce a bill in the Senate and House of Representatives in April 1954 that called for Eisenhower to provide up to $200,000 for Ronne’s expedition, along with the use of two ships, four aircraft, mechanised transport and service and civilian personnel.26 Although run by Ronne’s American Antarctic Association, it would be effectively a government expedition. And Ronne had government aims to the fore. Gone was his former idealistic attachment to the internationalisation of the Antarctic. In giving evidence to the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 1954, Ronne said that he wanted nothing more than to ‘make explorations into areas never yet seen by man in order to bolster the legitimate claims of the United States’.27
Despite support from Congress and the State Department, the Ronne expedition faced opposition from the Defense Department and the Bureau of the Budget, both for financial reasons and because of competition from Byrd’s IGY expedition. When Ronne turned to Laurence Gould for support, as he had so often in the past, he found that the influential geologist and former Antarctic explorer had become chairman of the Antarctic Committee in charge of organising America’s IGY contribution; he was therefore competing with Ronne for funds. With the repeated delays, Ronne began to pitch his expedition with reference to the IGY, noting to Gould how his proposed base ‘could lay the ground-work for the scientific activities’ of the IGY.28 However, his participation was complicated by the poisonous relationship between himself and Byrd.
Officials in the State Department were also wary of Byrd’s political influence. They did not want to see America lose its stake in the Antarctic because of a personal struggle between the two explorers. As a possible compromise, State Department officials suggested to Ronne that he abandon his proposal for a base and instead charter a Norwegian whaler to circumnavigate the continent so that ground control points could be obtained for the 80,000 aerial photographs that had been taken during Byrd’s Operation Highjump.29 But Ronne had no interest in finishing off Byrd’s work, particularly when he remained confident of getting Eisenhower’s approval for the Gould Bay base. Officials in Washington had other ideas.
By May 1954, American plans for the IGY were to have three bases: one at Little America, one in Marie Byrd Land and one at the South Pole. However, it was unclear which department would fund the program. The Defense Department could not see sufficient military reasons to pay for it out of its budget, which left scientists scrambling for support from elsewhere in Washington. Gould and officials from the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences asked the State Department to confirm that there were compelling scientific and political reasons to justify funding for their program. A senior State Department official readily agreed that the expenditure was justified on scientific and political grounds.
The political grounds make interesting reading. The creation of permanent bases was regarded as ‘necessary if our potential claims are to be preserved’, with the IGY allowing science to be used as a cover for doing so. Rather than the United States establishing bases unilaterally, which might lead to ‘charges of “imperialism” ’, America would do so as part of the IGY.30 In effect, it would be establishing bases in the areas it wanted to claim, but doing so at the suggestion of the international scientific community and – ostensibly – for scientific purposes.
America’s Antarctic policy came before the National Security Council in June 1954, before it was considered by Eisenhower. The council’s draft statement emphasised the economic resources that might be present in the Antarctic but noted that they would require further investigation. In order to secure these resources, it was considered vital that the United States make a territorial claim while part of the continent still remained unclaimed. American activities would not be restricted to the territory it claimed. The council argued that America’s objectives should be to secure the whole continent for the United States and its allies and to ‘exclude our most probable enemies’; to ensure ‘freedom of exploration and scientific investigation’ across the Antarctic for America and its allies; and to ensure ‘access to natural resources which may be found to be useful’.
America’s proposed territorial claim was to extend from the so-called Palmer Peninsula all the way west to Little America, which meant that it would intrude on the territories of both Britain and New Zealand. The CIA suggested that the United States might agree to recognise the claims of Argentina and Chile if, in return, the South Americans recognised the American claim from 90° W to Little America. Under this proposal, Britain would be shut out of the continent altogether. It was intended that America’s IGY program would be shaped to achieve these objectives.31 However, Eisenhower was not convinced about making a territorial claim.
For decades, there had been calls for the United States to formally claim all those areas that its citizens had discovered and explored. In more recent years, maps by the CIA and the State Department had shown where those claims might be made. But America had always refrained from actually making them, mainly for fear of upsetting its close allies. Eisenhower continued this tradition when he chaired the National Security Council on 15 July 1954; he instructed that America should ‘not suddenly make claims’ but should instead continue to reserve its rights. The important thing, said CIA director Allen Dulles, ‘was to make sure that Russia was not invited to take part in any discussions or negotiations respecting Antarctica’. Eisenhower agreed with the exclusion of the Russians, while ‘expressing strong approval of future expeditions to protect our rights in Antarctica’. The president left it to the State Department to ‘figure out’ how to achieve this, while also working towards an ‘early resolution of conflicting claims’ and the encouragement of ‘international arrangements to promote the over-all reduction of international friction’.32 Eisenhower’s attitude did not augur well for Ronne’s expedition.
Congress quickly fell in with the president’s policy. The Senate Armed Services committee agreed two weeks later that an expedition should be sent ‘at the earliest possible date … for the purpose of validating the territorial claims of the United States’.33 The motion had been moved by Senator Case and supported by Harry Byrd. But which expedition did the committee want the president to support? Although Ronne believed that he had Eisenhower’s support for an expedition in the coming summer, he was concerned to hear that the Defense Department was taking control. He told Gould that he hoped that the expedition would ‘not be a repetition of the Highjump show of 1947’ and would be in accordance with his plan.
Byrd, however, had other ideas. He viewed Ronne’s plan as a threat to his own hopes to lead one final expedition. As he told a cousin who was in the Texas oil business, there was an ‘urgency’ to his plans because ‘of the activities of some other nations who are trying to get the oil, coal, uranium, etc. down there’. And he was not going to let Ronne disrupt his plans. Byrd drew on all his political contacts, including the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Stennis, and officers in the navy. He also had sufficient political clout to request personal meetings with the president himself.34 Ronne’s leader at East Base in 1941, Richard Black, had advised Ronne to ‘get wise’ and join the IGY ‘Band Wagon’. Working in the Office of Naval Research, Black knew which way the political wind was blowing. He had advised the Armed Services Committee against supporting Ronne. However, Ronne dismissed Black’s advice, angrily describing him as an ‘egotistical “nut” [who] would double cross his own mother for personal gain’.35
In this case, Black’s advice was astute. Ronne’s hopes of getting away to the Antarctic were dashed. Instead, the navy dispatched the icebreaker Atka on a reconnaissance voyage in the summer of 1954–55 to check on possible sites for IGY bases. With Gould as chairman of America’s IGY Antarctic Committee, there was a happy coincidence between science and politics. As an explorer with Byrd at Little America, Gould had helped establish an American claim to Marie Byrd Land, and he was anxious for America’s IGY activities to concentrate on areas that would reinforce potential American claims. In October 1954, he told Captain George Dufek, who would be the naval commander of the IGY expedition, that the scientists strongly endorsed the planned program ‘at Little America, Marie Byrd Land, and the South Polar Plateau, sites which have great scientific significance both intrinsically and in terms of their role in the international network in Antarctica’. These sites, wrote Gould, should ‘have the highest priority’.36 The United States already had strong claims to the first two locations, while the South Polar Plateau had scientific significance and could provide the key to making other claims across the continent.
The Atka’s first call after leaving New Zealand was at the Bay of Whales, where Dufek discovered in January 1955 that the six DC-3 aircraft left behind by Byrd had floated out to sea, along with all the tents of Little America IV. Two great icebergs had broken off the western side of the bay, leaving the oft-used location unsuitable for any future expedition. However, there was another bay about fifty kilometres to the east, which had been first discovered by Shirase and named Kainan Bay, and which was now an alternative site for what would become Little America V.
From there, the Atka continued eastward until it had rounded the Antarctic Peninsula and passed the forbidding ice of the Weddell Sea. It was searching for a suitable site on the sea’s north-eastern shore but was unable to force its way through the ice. The Americans had to settle instead for a site on the coast of Queen Maud Land, further east, where an easy passage was found through hundreds of kilometres of ice. An American base on the Queen Maud coast could serve the expedition’s scientific purposes as well as provide an alternative airbase to supply the planned South Pole base.37
During the course of the Atka’s voyage, American plans for the IGY had expanded beyond the three bases that were originally envisaged. Plans for a larger scheme were set in motion after a meeting of IGY representatives in Rome decided that five additional IGY bases should be established to fill gaps in the scientific coverage of the continent. A Russian representative was attending the Rome meeting as an observer, and the State Department became concerned that the Soviet Union would accept this international invitation and establish its own foothold in the Antarctic, which might then provide the basis for a Russian territorial claim. The United States asked Norway and New Zealand to establish bases at Peter I Island and Ross Island respectively, and urged other ‘friendly powers’ to fill the remaining gaps before the Soviet Union did so, but the call met with little response.38 As a result, the United States boosted its planned bases to five: one at Kainan Bay, another in the interior of Marie Byrd Land, one at the South Pole and two on the coast of Queen Maud Land.
The first three of these bases provided Washington with the means to make a claim to the sector in which Marie Byrd Land was located, and Congressman Tollefson was determined that the United States should do just that. On 5 January 1955, as the Atka continued its voyage, Tollefson moved a resolution in the House of Representatives asserting America’s ‘right of sovereignty over that portion of the Antarctic Continent’ between 90° W and 150° W, as well as all other territories in the Antarctic where ‘discoveries, explorations, and claims on behalf of the United States have been made by nationals of the United States’. According to Tollefson, America ‘should share in the possible advantages, wealth, and resources of the Antarctic Continent’, particularly any ‘valuable minerals and oil’ that might lay hidden there.39
While Congress was referring Tollefson’s motion to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the Atka continued to crash its way through the ice, Ronne finally recast his expedition as an integral part of the IGY. All the while, he sensed the malevolent influence of his nemesis. Ronne therefore tried to keep his changed plans secret from Byrd for as long as possible. When the IGY organisers still opposed the idea of a base at Gould Bay, Ronne was able to enlist the support of the State Department, which wanted the base for political reasons. With both Britain and Argentina establishing bases nearby, the United States faced the possibility of being frozen out of the region if it did not move quickly to establish one of its own.
Although Byrd convinced senior naval officers to refuse Ronne the use of their ships, Ronne was saved by the veteran Norwegian whaler and explorer Lars Christensen, who offered to transport the expedition for free. Still, complained Ronne, the Byrd ‘influence is felt’.40
The Gould Bay base would now allow the United States to occupy an additional swathe of the continent. Taken together, the network of American bases and the massive scale of its logistical effort would make the United States the pre-eminent Antarctic power. But it was still unclear how that pre-eminence would be translated into territorial dominance.
Although most of the existing claimants wanted to have an American presence in the Antarctic in order to ward off the Russians, they were keen to limit the United States to the continent’s unclaimed sector. The Australian government, in particular, wanted to keep the Americans out of the Australian Antarctic Territory, which still remained empty of bases. With no early prospect of a continental base, the leader of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition, Phillip Law, was doing all he could to reinforce Australia’s tenuous title.
Law had been imbued with a much keener appreciation of Antarctic politics after accompanying the British–Norwegian–Swedish expedition to Antarctica in 1950 and returning by way of the United Kingdom, where he had long discussions with Brian Roberts at the Foreign Office. Law recalled that these talks made him aware of the ‘political aspects of Antarctic work’. It was Roberts who emphasised the peril Australia would face if ever the Norwegians were to challenge Australia’s possession of the western part of its territory.
Fortified by his talks with Roberts, Law returned to Australia determined to ‘nullify’ the work of the Norwegians by ‘doing every sort of science that we could think of’ and by ‘developing the mapping, together with the geology that goes with this sort of field work, and the glaciology’. Roberts had stressed to Law the importance of names as a means of holding on to territory. As Law later recalled, ‘when you put a name on a feature, you’re saying “We got here first”. So the more names you can get on features in Antarctica the better your claims are.’41
In Australia, Law became the sole authority to whom names had to be submitted for approval, until he passed the responsibility to a committee in October 1952. It followed the British decision to accept the names approved by the sovereign power, which meant that French and Norwegian names in their territories were applied without translation, while France and Norway did likewise with English names on their maps. At least as far as these claimant nations were concerned, their Antarctic maps would become ‘substantially the same’.42 The British decision also meant that Australia had to apply names to as many geographic features as possible within its Antarctic territory, and to decide on the names proposed by the United States for features photographed on Australian territory during Operation Highjump.
The first meeting of Australia’s Committee on Antarctic Names was held in Canberra on 21 October 1952 and was chaired by Law. The committee included Mawson and the director of the National Mapping Section, Bruce Lambert, and quickly decided to complete a revision of Australia’s 1939 map so that it could be published as soon as possible. Lambert had been largely responsible for the 1939 publication and was acutely aware of the power of maps to reinforce a nation’s sovereignty. With American names now likely to be approved for the Australian territory, Lambert was anxious to ensure that they would be overwhelmed by Australian ones. Mawson agreed to send him any ‘aerial photos of un-named features which could be fixed accurately enough to be named’, while the committee decided that ‘all features which had ever been surveyed or named should be listed for consideration whether they had appeared in the 1939 map or not’.43
The problem for the Australians was that the Americans had flown over much of the coastline and immediate hinterland of the Australian Antarctic Territory, and had produced aerial photographs that revealed in fine detail practically all of its geographical features. However, only in a few places had they landed surveyors by helicopter to obtain astronomical fixes. Law was prepared to accept American names for the major features that they had first sighted from the air but was loath to allow the Americans to ‘saturate’ hundreds of kilometres of coastline with their names based upon relatively brief flights. To do so would leave nothing to be named by the Australian surveyor ‘who, by dangerous and laborious surface travel, later covers the same area to obtain the necessary astrofixes’.
There was also a deeper reason. The Americans had named many of the features after their explorer Charles Wilkes and his men and their ships. This, Law noted, would leave readers of the map with the impression ‘that the features were discovered by Wilkes’, when there was no certainty they had been, and that the United States thereby had some claim to the territory. Indeed, the subsequent American maps of the Antarctic had ‘Wilkes Land’ spread in large letters across most of the Australian Antarctic Territory, and Australian and British names writ small. In contrast, Australian maps had Wilkes Land writ small and Australian and British names writ large.44
Law suggested in late 1951 that a survey flight be made from Australia to the Antarctic as a way of reinforcing the nation’s sovereignty. The pioneer aviator Captain P. G. Taylor, who had just proved the feasibility of an air route to Chile by way of Easter Island, volunteered to make a return flight to the Antarctic in the same Catalina flying boat. Apart from reinforcing its territorial rights, Law thought aircraft might provide an economical way of supplying bases. The proposal was embraced by the newly installed External Affairs minister, Richard Casey, who had long been an enthusiastic supporter of Antarctic exploration. Casey told his cabinet colleagues in October 1951 that such a flight would go far to ‘fortifying Australian claims to sovereignty’ and also prepare ‘the way for flights to the Australian sector after an Australian station is established on the mainland’. Flying an aircraft 2600 kilometres to land among icebergs in a place where blizzards could suddenly erupt would be a risky enterprise. However, Casey argued that the risk would be acceptable if a naval ship was stationed midway to provide weather advice.45 Moreover, the French base in Adélie Land could provide additional weather forecasts and fuel.
The flight soon encountered problems. The French had no room on their ship for Taylor’s fuel, and the United States refused to train him in the latest methods of polar navigation. Despite these setbacks, Taylor was willing to try anyway, and proposed that he take on fuel at Macquarie Island by landing on water on the lee side of the island and then using rocket-assisted take-off. The cost of the flight would only be £3400, and the cost could be recouped partly by carrying philatelic mail, which would add to the ‘international publicity value for Australia in “showing the flag” for our Antarctic Territory’.
Law urged that the flight go ahead, arguing that the ‘prestige value’ alone would be worth the small expense. However, the navy’s commitments in Korea meant that it had no cruiser available to act as a weather ship, while Prime Minister Menzies was concerned that the flight might be ‘unduly hazardous’. Casey had some misgivings too and suggested that it be delayed until January 1953.46
Taylor was further frustrated when a fire at the French base in January 1952 destroyed its radio and weather equipment. He complained to Law that ‘he had been made [to] look ridiculous in the eyes of the public and he was fed up with the government about the whole affair’. Taylor wanted to make the flight as soon as an ‘opportunity presented itself’, threatening to go to the press if he was ‘messed around any further’. Although the French agreed to take fuel for Taylor when they resupplied their burnt-out base, the flight never went ahead.47 It was no longer necessary.
Law had learnt of an icebreaker being built by a Danish shipping company and managed to charter the ship. It was a timely discovery, with other nations likely to establish bases on Australia’s Antarctic territory during the IGY. In January 1953, the Australian cabinet finally agreed to an Antarctic base after Law convinced Casey that it could be done by reducing the number of personnel on Heard Island. As a further cost-saver and a way of finding the necessary scientists, Casey suggested that South Africa, Canada and New Zealand could be asked to contribute men and money. The participation of the other Commonwealth countries might also ensure they would side with Australia in the event of its title being challenged at a later date. This was an important consideration, because the protection of Australia’s title was the rationale for the base. As Casey’s cabinet submission made clear, ‘other considerations are subordinate to this’ since it was ‘useless to talk of scientific or material wealth if the region is not ours to exploit’.48 Not that sovereignty was foremost in the public justification for the base.
When Casey announced the establishment of the base in March, he concentrated on the practical, material benefits that were likely to accrue to Australia. Everything from uranium to coal was there in abundance, according to Casey’s fevered imagination. There were also the possibilities of developing a trans-Antarctic air route and exploiting the ‘great food resources’ of the surrounding seas. Moreover, meteorology, and the possibility of seasonal forecasts, would be a great boon for a nation whose wealth was built on wool and wheat. Strategic factors were also noted, with Casey portraying the continent as being ‘close to Australia’s back door’.49
Australians were not like the people of Argentina or Chile, or even the United States. There had been no tickertape parades for Australia’s returning explorers, and no Australian prime minister would ever emulate the Chileans by visiting the Antarctic to make a symbolic statement of possession. As a journalist found when he did a straw poll of passers-by in a Sydney street in November 1952, there was widespread ignorance of Australia’s stake in Antarctica.50 Law and Casey faced a continuous struggle to create popular interest and a sense of Australian ownership. Journalist Osmar White was one of those encouraged to spread the word. Just days after Casey’s announcement, White wrote an article for the Melbourne Herald in which he portrayed the personnel of Australia’s base as the ‘first colonists’ who would be occupying the ‘forerunner of other permanent posts’.51
On 4 January 1954, Casey was on Melbourne’s South Wharf to farewell the nine men who were going in the small Danish icebreaker Kista Dan to establish the first permanent Australian base. He told the crowd of relatives and well-wishers that the men were going ‘to help consolidate our claim to a large section of the Antarctic continent and to lay the foundations of scientific research there’. In charge of the base would be surveyor Bob Dovers, whose father had been on Mawson’s 1929 expedition, which had laid the legal foundation for the title to the Australian Antarctic Territory. Now Dovers was off to reinforce that title, taking with him an ice pick that his father had used back in 1929. It would provide a symbolic continuity between the past and the present. Law went on the voyage to oversee the landing and to film the experience. The official report of the departure likened the Kista Dan to the ships of Christopher Columbus, Francis Drake and James Cook. Describing Antarctica as a ‘treasure house’, the report predicted that, within twenty years, the Antarctic would ‘figure in the world’s commerce and conversation just as largely as uranium does now’.52
In choosing a site for the base, Law had convinced the committee that the western part of the territory would be best for the geophysical work that he wanted to do. It would also remove any possibility of the Norwegians going there and claiming it as their own, based upon the work of Christensen’s expeditions in the 1930s. Ironically, in choosing the site, Law and Mawson had used Christensen’s aerial photographs to find a safe anchorage for the Kista Dan adjacent to patches of bare rock on which a base might be built. Importantly, the location also had easy access to the polar plateau, which would expedite exploration and the collection of ice for fresh water. Horseshoe Bay was the best site in more than 6000 kilometres of coastline, recalled Law, and Australia owed it all to the Norwegian explorers.53
However, the base would not be named after the Norwegians who had done so much to explore the region but after Mawson, whose flag-raising voyages in 1929–31 had allowed Australia to annex the territory. Law went on to do some flag-raising of his own when he pressured the Danish captain to head east to two contested sites, where the Norwegian explorers and Mawson had raised their respective flags in the 1930s. One was the Scullin Monolith and the other was the Vestfold Hills, where Law went ashore and raised the Australian flag in the manner of Mawson. As with Mawson’s ceremonies, it was all captured on film.
Law was not only leader of the expedition but also its official photographer, using a cine camera to create a half-hour colour documentary that blended dramatic shots of the ship battling through heavy seas, cute film of penguins cavorting in the ship’s wake and a claiming ceremony that would leave audiences in no doubt about the territory’s ownership. The resulting film, Blue Ice, was clever political propaganda that was designed both to build public support for the Antarctic effort and to inform the world of Australia’s work. There was one part of the film that the government did not want the world to see, however, and Law was instructed to remove a shot that showed two men using a Geiger counter to test rocks for radioactivity. The Department of Defence decreed that it could not be shown if there was any sign of a flicker on the counter. Doubtless it feared that any possibility of uranium would only encourage other countries to compete for its possession.
Law suggested that he should show the film to audiences of influential citizens in each capital city. One of the first of these select audiences was hosted by the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, and Law suggested that Casey host a similar event for parliamentarians in Canberra. Ordinary citizens also got to see the film when the Ferguson tractor company, which had one of its tractors featured, showed it throughout rural New South Wales and Victoria. There were even greater audiences overseas, where the film was shown on television in Britain, Europe and the United States; it was even awarded a prize in Italy.54
The success of the film convinced Law to make an even greater public-relations effort. He pressured the government’s News and Information Bureau to issue articles to overseas newspapers so that the work of the Antarctic Division would be more widely known. Yet when Colliers magazine asked in August 1954 to send a journalist on the next voyage of the Kista Dan, Law refused ‘because of the difficulty of controlling such a person’. Law preferred to write the stories himself and suggested taking a cine photographer so that another film could be made. The following year he took a journalist from the News and Information Bureau who would not object to having his work censored and who had already shown that he had the Antarctic division’s ‘best interests at heart’.55
Yet Law was hard to satisfy. He was outraged when shown a draft of the commentary for the second film, Antarctic Voyage. Although it had been made by the Department of the Interior and written by a journalist from the News and Information Bureau, there was no mention of Law and his officers or of the Antarctic Division. Instead, it read more like a scenic travelogue, Law complained, with the Danish ship being the effective star of the film. He promptly rewrote the script to remove some references to the ship and insert mentions of himself, the base leaders and the serious nature of the expedition’s work.56 Law was similarly punctilious about the publication of an official booklet about Antarctica, calling for it to be ‘far more subtle in its propaganda approach’ by putting ‘the accent on the scientific importance rather than the economic exploitation of Antarctica’.57
Casey competed with Law in writing articles for newspaper publication and would accompany them with specially drawn maps that gave a misleading view of the propinquity of Australia to its Antarctic territory. He used Australian embassies to submit them to editors around the world and was exultant when one was widely used. The purpose, according to Casey, was to have Australian ownership of its territory embraced by the Australian public and acknowledged by the world.58 Law’s aims were rather wider, and he resented Casey’s efforts to control the publicity from his ministerial office.59 Law pointed to his own record in getting good press coverage and his success in having critical articles suppressed by sympathetic editors. Moreover, the publicity was not just about politics, wrote Law, but about acknowledging the work of the personnel, who were not public servants but ‘adventurers who have volunteered for a dangerous job’.60
At least Australia had a base established in the Antarctic before the rush of IGY activity descended on its shores. It was not clear whether New Zealand would ever have such a base. The diminutive nation had been aware since the war that its claim to the Ross Dependency would never hold up in a court of international law. The Ross Dependency was in the curious position of having been annexed by Britain and placed under the administration of New Zealand, which expected one day to become its sovereign power. But neither Britain nor New Zealand had done much to exercise sovereignty since it was first annexed in 1923. The government of Peter Fraser had refused to join the post-war scramble for Antarctica, and pushed instead for an international regime that would give New Zealand a measure of control over the continent’s exploitation at a minimum cost.
With no international regime in prospect, and with other nations preparing to send expeditions, New Zealand began to reassess its position. In July 1953, the government agreed that two of its scientists could accompany the forthcoming Australian expedition to the Antarctic, provided that it did not have to contribute to the cost.61 When Britain then announced the Trans-Antarctic Expedition, New Zealand’s interest in retaining the Ross Dependency began to stir.62
In October 1954, Fuchs sent a confidential letter about his expedition to the English geologist and mountaineer Noel Odell, who had tried to climb Everest with George Mallory in 1924 and was now a professor in New Zealand. Fuchs was keen to learn from Odell what assistance might be anticipated from New Zealand. As Fuchs’ expedition would end its journey at Ross Island on McMurdo Sound, he hoped to recruit a New Zealander as leader of the McMurdo base. Fuchs suggested that New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary, who had made the first ascent of Mount Everest in May 1953, might be recruited to head the base. Such an appointment would help ensure public and government support.63 The New Zealand government had already agreed to the importance of the expedition and the need for a base on Ross Island, but still it shrank from committing any funds. A surge in public interest soon forced the government to change its view.
There had long been a small group of New Zealanders interested in Antarctic exploration. Now they had a powerful supporter in Hillary, who attended a meeting at an Auckland home in December 1954, which agreed to form a ‘Committee for the Discussion of Antarctic Matters’. The sixteen members were unanimous in wanting ‘to get New Zealanders into Antarctica’. A national committee was quickly formed to bring pressure on the government. The initial plan, possibly at Hillary’s suggestion, was for a base to be located in the northern part of Victoria Land near the Admiralty Range, with the prospect of climbing the mountains providing ‘a draw to New Zealanders’. It was envisaged that a second party might ‘capture the public imagination’ by visiting Scott’s base on Ross Island, before going on to recondition the cairn erected over the frozen bodies of Scott’s party.64 It was all about political symbolism rather than science.
The committee soon found itself tangled with the existing Antarctic Society, which had been formed in the 1930s and had branches in Dunedin and Wellington. The society’s ‘constant and unswerving aim’ was to remind New Zealand of its ‘territorial responsibilities in the Ross Dependency’. It could hardly claim much success in that regard. But the atmosphere was changing, with Hillary’s profile and the arrival of the American icebreaker Atka focusing attention on the threat to New Zealand’s sovereignty. The New York Times science journalist Walter Sullivan was on board the Atka, and he noted how the ship’s visit had caused many New Zealanders to fear that they were about to lose the Ross Dependency ‘by default’.
That was the argument used by the Antarctic Society when a deputation of its members crammed into the office of the Minister for External Affairs, Tom Macdonald, on 14 January 1955. As the recently departed Atka steamed its way southwards, the deputation called on the government to ‘exercise acts of possession’ so that New Zealand could be sure of holding on to the Ross Dependency. To keep the momentum going, a National Expedition Planning Committee was established, with Hillary’s Auckland group being reconstituted as a branch of the Antarctic Society.65
Macdonald had already been told by his officials of the need to send an expedition. He was warned that the United States had a greater claim to the eastern part of the Ross Dependency. Moreover, Washington was hinting that it was planning a base in the western part, if New Zealand did not establish one first. To avert the possibility of the United States having a stronger claim than New Zealand to the entire Ross Dependency, the government had to show that it had ‘established effective physical possession’. By having a base on Ross Island, New Zealand would restrict the Americans to the eastern part of the dependency and might even exclude the Russians altogether.66
These were compelling arguments, and the New Zealand cabinet decided on 18 January 1955 that it should have a base on Ross Island, which would support both the Trans-Antarctic Expedition and the IGY. However, the decision was made in the absence of Prime Minister Sidney Holland, who was in London. On his return, he announced instead that his government would contribute £50,000 to Fuchs’ expedition. That decision would cause ‘widespread disappointment among interested New Zealanders’, predicted the Antarctic Society.67 In the face of the negative reaction, the cabinet referred the issue to the Department of External Affairs for advice on the ‘minimum action’ required to maintain New Zealand’s title. The government was told that it required the British government to send an expedition, and for New Zealand to be ‘prominently and substantially identified’ with it. It was an optimistic view, since the report also noted the necessity of permanent occupation as a precondition for sovereignty.68
The organisers of the IGY had asked New Zealand to man a base on the Ross Sea, but the scientific program was not regarded as sufficient to justify the expense. If a base was to be established, its primary purpose had to be ‘to meet the requirements of Sovereignty and the Trans Antarctic Journey’. In April 1955, the New Zealand cabinet was urged to support New Zealand’s independent participation in the Trans-Antarctic Expedition, so as to ‘reinforce New Zealand title to the territory’ and to ‘meet the broad public demand that New Zealand show an active interest in the Antarctic’. Cabinet agreed that New Zealand should show its authority, both by making new laws for the Ross Dependency and by sending expeditions from ‘time to time’ to ‘enter and remain for significant periods in the Dependency’. It would begin by participating in the Trans-Antarctic Expedition ‘on a patently New Zealand basis, with the Base at Ross Island manned by a New Zealand party’. That would serve as ‘positive evidence of New Zealand interest’, while New Zealand approached Britain to have the Ross Dependency formally made part of New Zealand. In the interim, it supported the formation of the Ross Sea Committee, to which it contributed the £50,000 that had been earmarked to go to Fuchs. The government hoped that the committee might be able to raise sufficient funds from a public appeal to relieve it of any further burden.69
Nearly ten years of prevarication had not helped the New Zealand cause. Hillary was dismayed to find, when he went to Paris in mid-1955 for an IGY conference, that the Americans and Russians had ‘ambitious plans’ to establish bases during the IGY. He was particularly shocked to learn from America’s Admiral Dufek that the New Zealand government had approved a proposal for a large American base at McMurdo Sound, where New Zealand had been planning a base of its own. The New Zealanders had left their run too late. Hillary was not only ‘distressed at the thought of the major American Base … cluttering up our possible base sites’ but ‘also felt considerable concern at the sovereignty angle’.
Nevertheless, he and Fuchs met with Dufek to discuss how the Americans might assist the New Zealanders by transporting some of their equipment to the Antarctic.70 This was not something that Fuchs wanted for his own expedition, which he was determined to keep separate from the Americans. He did not want to be reliant on them except in an emergency. Fuchs would not even inform the Americans of anything more than the ‘broad programme and timing’ of his expedition for fear they would beat him there. He also had fears about Hillary, whose fame threatened to cast Fuchs into the shade. He agreed that Hillary would be offered a ‘responsible part’ but made clear that there would only be ‘one command’.71
While the Americans planned to use their McMurdo base as a supply depot for their IGY bases, New Zealand’s small base would be dwarfed by the much greater American presence, and would be reliant on the Americans for transport to and from the continent.72 Yet New Zealand somehow believed that this level of activity would secure its claim to the Ross Dependency. Even that was in doubt when the Ross Sea Committee failed to raise more than one-fifth of the £100,000 that the government had hoped it would. The public clearly wanted the government to pay for what they regarded as a national expedition.
To make up the shortfall, the government finally decided in April 1956 to purchase a ship and an aircraft for the expedition, and to provide radio equipment for the base. The ship was Britain’s John Biscoe, which had just been replaced by a new ship of the same name. The old ship was transferred to the New Zealand Navy and renamed as the HMNZS Endeavour. The purchase of the ship was belated recognition that only a permanent base would suffice as the American grip on the Ross Dependency grew stronger. The United States would have not only the massive McMurdo base but also a smaller base at Point Hallett on Cape Adare, which would provide weather information. At America’s suggestion, New Zealand agreed to contribute three staff to complement the nine Americans at Cape Adare. Again, New Zealand imagined that this would be sufficient to uphold its sovereignty in the area.73
New Zealand regarded its new-found relationship with the United States – by which the United States used New Zealand as a take-off point for its ships and aircraft and New Zealand used those same transport facilities to shift its people around the Ross Dependency – as being of ‘mutual interest’. Macdonald told his colleagues that cooperation with the Americans would allow New Zealand to ‘strengthen our claim to the Ross Dependency’, while having ‘a close and powerful ally in that part of the Antarctic’.74 Meanwhile, New Zealand asserted its sovereignty by appointing Hillary as a magistrate and postmaster, and the captain of the Endeavour as deputy administrator, magistrate and justice of the peace.
The government decided that it was ‘unnecessarily provocative’ to also have a postmaster at Point Hallett. However, the administrator of the Ross Dependency, Captain Harold Ruegg, made a token visit to McMurdo in January 1957, where he oversaw the opening of a post office at the Ross Island base. Four Ross Dependency stamps were issued to show the world that New Zealand really was in possession of the territory; the postmaster-general was told that the purpose was to ‘emphasize the sovereignty aspect’. Accordingly, the stamps depicted Ross’s ship, the Erebus, and a laurel-wreathed Shackleton and Scott against a map of the Ross Dependency. There was also another map of the dependency – with its boundary extending all the way north to encompass New Zealand, although the distance was foreshortened – and a stamp of Queen Elizabeth, which together were to show that the Ross Dependency was British Commonwealth territory.75
The issuing of the stamps was just part of a flurry of activity by the seven existing Antarctic claimants in the years prior to the IGY, as they sought to shore up their separate territorial claims. Those years also saw the United States and Russia engage in similar activities in order to reinforce what they regarded as their rights in the Antarctic. Despite the increase in activity, these nations were still overshadowed in numbers by the whalers, who continued to return in their hundreds to reap their grisly harvest from the surrounding waters. By the summer of 1956–57, there were twenty factory ships and 225 whale-catchers in Antarctic waters.76
But the industry would soon enter a state of steep decline. The old days of the Antarctic, when it was dominated by explorers and whalers, were ending. The onset of the IGY in 1957 would see expeditions from twelve nations make a cooperative effort to establish scientific bases around the coast and across the continent’s interior. Science was in the ascendant, and cooperation rather than competition was the new watchword on the ice.