The sun nudged over the northern horizon towards the end of August, a sign that they would soon have to start moving, but although it crept higher each day, there were few other signs of a let-up in the winter. The temperature dropped to –50 °C and there were winds of up to sixty-three miles per hour. Fuchs had prepared an ambitious programme of reconnaissance, aerial exploration and survey work in the area before the departure of the main party on the traverse, but this very soon had to be modified. Most important was the reconnaissance on the ground of the terrain between Shackleton and South Ice.
It was 8 October before Fuchs, with deputy leader David Stratton and his two engineers, David Pratt and Roy Homard, set out with four vehicles to make the reconnaissance. They had three types of vehicle on the expedition, the largest and most sophisticated of them, the Sno-Cat, rode on four-tracked pontoons; then there was the Weasel, an oblong box on two tracks, and finally some modified tractors. One of the Weasels, driven by Homard, broke down within eight miles of Shackleton Base and, although they made a temporary repair, there was no question of taking the vehicle all the way. Roy Homard drove it back to Base, leaving the others to press on.
It was discouraging, nerve-wracking work as they edged their way over the crevassed ice shelf. Walking across a crevassed region is bad enough, but cooped in the cabin of a vehicle it must have been much worse, with the ever-present thought of hurtling downwards into the black pit of a crevasse, trapped in the cockpit. Roped together, it needed precise driving to ensure that there was enough slack cable to allow the front vehicle to surge forward if it started to go into a hidden chasm (and thus, perhaps, manage to bridge it), and yet not so much slack that it could fall into the crevasse and become irretrievably jammed or perhaps even break the rope. The cabins of the vehicles were unheated, for Fuchs believed that the interior should be a similar temperature to the outside to avoid the driver becoming cocooned from the environment, but it meant being perpetually cold, encumbered in furs or down clothing at all times. Some days they made little more than two or three miles’ progress, spending most of the time hauling vehicles out of crevasses or backtracking to find a better way round a particularly bad area. Time was now slipping by. They had set out a week late anyway, and were now badly over time. It took them thirty-seven days to reach South Ice; they had lost one vehicle and were forced to abandon another temporarily.
Back at Shackleton Base, the morale of the team had reached a low ebb. In the absence of the two most experienced engineers, they were badly behind in their maintenance programme and several of the vehicles were still buried in the snow. Several members of the crossing team had never even camped on Antarctic ice before; there was a feeling of unpreparedness and even of a haunting failure, not eased by the constant barrage of queries over the radio from the world’s press, asking when they were going to start, or for news of Hillary’s progress on the other side of the continent.
With three modified Ferguson farm tractors and a Weasel loaned by the American polar station, Hillary’s party had climbed the Skelton Glacier, the major obstacle barring their way to the polar plateau, and had established their second depot for Fuchs’ polar crossing. Viewing the efforts of the two parties, there seems a dynamic energy about everything that the New Zealand support party did, while the main party seems to have had a slow, cumbersome quality about its approach and progress. The difference was noticeable from the very start. While it took most of the energies of the main party just to erect their complex jigsaw of pre-assembled huts, Hillary’s simplified structures left his team with the time and the energy to start their reconnaissance programme before the arrival of winter. He wasted no time in getting his dog teams out to find a way up on to the Antarctic plateau, first they looked at the Ferrar Glacier, but the lower part was too badly broken up by crevasses and ice towers, so they turned their attention to the Skelton Glacier and, in spite of deep snow, managed to climb it before winter. They established a depot at the top of it which was stocked by air. Hillary was still not content, however. He wanted to try out his farm tractors and decided to make a journey to Cape Crozier, repeating the incredible winter journey made by Wilson and described by Apsley Cherry-Garrard on Scott’s expedition in 1910.
They had set out in the middle of winter to investigate the nesting habits of the emperor penguin. In Cherry-Garrard’s words: ‘And so we started just after midwinter on the weirdest birdsnesting expedition that has ever been or ever will be.’ For nineteen days three of them had hauled a heavily laden sledge through the bitter cold and dark of the Antarctic winter. They had then built a tiny stone hut at Cape Crozier as a shelter while they observed the penguins. I remember reading the account while I was on an expedition to Nuptse, the third peak of Everest. Whenever I thought the climbing was getting at all rough, all I had to do was to read Cherry-Garrard’s description to know that our Himalayan expedition was a holiday compared to what they had gone through.
Hillary’s experience was also very much easier. Having set out on 19 March with two tractors, they took three days to cover the distance that had taken Wilson and his party nineteen. It did give them an insight, however, into some of the drawbacks of the tractors and produced ideas for modification to improve both their performance and comfort. As a result of their experience, Hillary built a canvas shelter for the driver of each tractor and a caravan or caboose on runners, so that the team could use it for cooking and sleeping in during their journey the following year. As on the other side, the New Zealand team spent the winter preparing for the summer’s activities and doing scientific work. Hillary, in consultation with the scientists, had prepared an extensive programme for the following year but was then amazed – indeed, outraged – when the Committee of Management back in New Zealand vetoed many of his plans as being too ambitious or risky.
‘I had no particular desire to offend the committee but I was confident that the programme was well within our powers. I continued as though the exchange of messages had never occurred, made a few worthwhile modifications to the plans and reintroduced the idea of a push towards the Pole it I could get enough extra fuel at Depot 700. It was becoming clear to me that a supporting role was not my particular strength. Once we had done all that was asked of us and a good bit more – I could see no reason why we shouldn’t organise a few interesting challenges for ourselves.’
Hillary’s approach to his venture was as a mountaineer. The summit was the South Pole and he wanted to get there. His three team members, like himself, had had no previous Antarctic experience. Pete Mulgrew was a petty officer in the New Zealand Navy and an expert on wireless communications. He was also a climber and he and Hillary formed a close friendship from the very start. Mulgrew’s original role had been to remain at Base, controlling the rear link back to the outside world, but he had set his heart on the Pole from the very beginning, was irrepressibly adventurous and, anyway, Hillary needed a good wireless operator for their polar journey. The other two members of the ‘Old firm’, as they called themselves, were Jim Bates, a brilliant mechanic and inventor who was also an expert skier, and Murray Ellis who was an engineering graduate with sound mechanical knowledge. Hillary was the only member of the team who knew anything about celestial navigation, and so he would have the sole responsibility for pointing them in the right direction.
They set out from Scott Base on 14 October with their one Weasel and three tractors towing the cumbersome caboose they had made and the heavily laden sledges. No one had much confidence in the tractors, since they had not been designed for the task in hand and the modifications were of a makeshift character. Two dog teams, with Bob Miller and George Marsh, one of the two English polar experts with the expedition, were flown in to the foot of the Skelton Glacier, so that they could lead the route which they had already completed the previous year. With the constant threat of concealed crevasses, the four drivers took turns in going out in front to make the route, each trusting the ability of the others. This was in marked contrast to Fuchs’ approac
h. He insisted on being out in front the whole time, physically leading the expedition, taking the major risk, but also taking the satisfaction of actually finding a route. Hillary’s policy of sharing the lead among the team certainly increased the enjoyment of the individual team members and also enabled them to make better progress. In a matter of days, Hillary had reached the Antarctic plateau, ready to establish his depots and then, once free of this responsibility, make his push for the Pole. He set out across the plateau on 12 November, just one day before Fuchs reached South Ice – still on the reconnaissance. The main party had not even left Shackleton Base, and were still not ready for their part of the expedition.
Vivian Fuchs now announced that, come what may, they would set out on 24 November. It meant working round the clock to get all the vehicles ready in time but, on the 24th at 6.45 p.m., they were ready at last and set out with three Sno-Cats, two Weasels and a converted Muskeg tractor. There were eleven men in the party and they were going to pick up the vehicles used in their recce at South Ice, also the two dog teams which had found the route up on to the plateau. It was a very much larger team than Hillary’s and, of course, had further to go. The atmosphere and discipline of the party was also very different. Fuchs made the decisions. The only person with whom he consulted closely was his deputy leader, David Stratton, an Antarctic veteran from an Antarctic-experienced family background; he had been to Harrow School and concealed behind a relaxed, easy-going manner, immense determination and an extremely well-ordered mind. He did much to soften and warm Vivian Fuchs’ cool, unemotional – at times apparently insensitive – approach to his fellow expedition members.
From the very start it was slow going. They were not making much better progress than had the reconnaissance. The vehicles regularly smashed into concealed crevasses or were forced to make long and painful diversions. By 29 November, five days out from Shackleton Base, they had covered only forty miles. On that same day, Ed Hillary reached Depot 480 on the plateau; he was 480 miles into his journey, some 770 miles from the South Pole.
But now they were on the move, the morale of the Fuchs party was high. Lowe commented:
‘I had always been critical of the lack of cohesion, of bad communications, of being kept in the dark about expedition plans, of the failure to give both men and vehicles at least a taste of rehearsal before the big journey began; and I tended also to be the channel through whom Bunny would receive the grievances of others in the party. As I followed the yellow tail of Bunny’s Cat into the wilderness, I felt a little contrite and resolved to be more reasonable.’
Other members of the team, the old polar hands, were less critical than George Lowe. Hal Lister, who shared a tent throughout the expedition with George, had already had a two-year stint on the Greenland Ice Cap. He was a glaciologist and accepted the discipline and structured command which prevails in polar circles. Indeed, he even found Bunny Fuchs to be positively easy-going compared with the naval commander who had been in charge of his Greenland expedition. He had that polar mentality that accepts, even welcomes, the long monotonous grind of polar travel, the conservatism that rejects new foods, equipment or ways of doing things in favour of the well-tried ways of tradition. There were aspects of Fuchs’ approach that even Lowe found he had to agree with. The question of tent sharing was one. Rather than leave it to the individual, Fuchs posted on the noticeboard the list of the six tent pairings with a footnote stressing that they were final and that there would be no swapping during the journey. Lowe wrote:
‘At first I thought this was a mistake but looking back I realise that Bunny was right. Over the long journey where the going was mostly a monotonous unchanging ice desert with occasional moments of fear and excitement, there had to be an attitude of hardness and an intelligent determination to quash the inevitable personal differences and be ever-aware that we simply must live cheerfully together. The philosophy took the general line, “You volunteered, so get on with it”.’
Above all, whatever reservations Lowe or others might have had about Fuchs’ style of leadership, they could not help respecting both his determination and ability. Nobody ever challenged his commands. The morale of the traversing team remained high throughout.
It was a long-drawn-out marathon with its own built-in routine. There was, of course, no night and they could have travelled twenty-four hours a day, around the clock – as indeed Hillary did on quite a few occasions. Fuchs, on the other hand, settled into a steady routine, partly dictated by his own policy of staying out in front the whole time. He could only motor for as long as his own endurance would keep him going. On the whole they worked an eighteen-hour day, with six hours in each twenty-four given over to rest and sleep. At the end of a stint, Fuchs would signal the stop, the vehicles would draw up and the pyramid tents would be taken off the sledges. There was always something of a race to be the first party to erect one’s tent and have a brew going. One man would have the outside berth and he would do all the outside jobs, while the one with the inside berth would disappear into the tent the moment it was erected, would accept and place the reindeer-skin mats, sleeping bags, food box and stove and would then get a brew on, trying to have it ready by the time the outside man had finished his chores of staking out the tent and preparing everything for the ‘night’ outside.
The evening meal was the traditional sledging ration of pemmican hooch, a huge slab of butter plastered over a biscuit and very sweet cocoa. It was monotonous, never varied but somehow in the extreme cold the taste buds seem to be anaesthetised and you can eat almost anything. The key thing was that this sledging ration had sufficient calories to keep them going in the extreme cold. One of the reasons that Scott’s party had died was that they were not taking enough calories each day and, as a result, slowly starved to death, losing the strength to withstand the cold and the gruelling labour of hauling their sledges. Hillary had shrugged aside the traditional Arctic ration and, in this perhaps, made a mistake. Fuchs told me:
‘Hillary threw out all the sledging rations and put in a lot of tins of sausages and beans and other tinned foods. The Americans said to me when we arrived at the Pole, “We’re glad to see that you’re in such good shape. Hillary and his party were on their last legs when they got here.” That was their comment. It was the food they’d taken with them. They didn’t have enough sustenance.’
And then sleep – it was warm enough in the down sleeping bags, though through the journey the bags got progressively more damp from the condensation of sweat as it reached the outer layers which could be –30 °C. The jangle of the alarm having woken them, the outside man would reach out, struggle to light the Primus stove and then shove on to it a panful of snow or ice collected the previous night. He would then have a few more precious minutes of warmth, lying dozing to the sound of the Primus. Once it was ready, a big mugful of tea and a biscuit overloaded with butter, perhaps some porridge, preceded the most painful moment of the day – getting out of the warmth of the pit for another gruelling day of travel. Everything was in an automated routine: outside man gets dressed and out first, then the inside man, who passes everything out of the tent, including the ground sheet. His final act is to drop his trousers and relieve himself in the precious shelter and comparative warmth of the now empty tent. Having done this he crawls out and the outside man takes his turn. It is very important to get one’s bowels into the correct rhythm to avoid the agony of a frozen bum!
Once the gear was loaded on to the sledge, it was time to start up the vehicles. Every piece of metal was around –30 °C, cold enough to give you a frostburn if you touched it with a bare hand. The gasoline had been specially treated to expel all water or water vapour, since this would inevitably freeze, and little particles of ice would then block the jets of the carburettor. Even so, there could still be some icing. They used hot air guns, sometimes even played a blowtorch over the cylinder block and fuel tubes to warm up the engine and get it going. An engine would roar into life, then another; the laggards might
be given a tow start, or one of the engineers would come over to give the unfortunate driver the benefit of his expertise until, at last, all the engines were throbbing away.
Fuchs would give a wave from his Sno-Cat, Rock’n Roll, and away he’d go, his team obediently following. Sometimes it was easy going in smooth, firm snow and the vehicles could cream along at a steady four to five miles per hour. More often the snow was deep with the tracks sinking and thrashing into a slough of snow or, even worse, the ground was heavily crevassed with huge chasms, some of them 1,000 feet deep and big enough to house St Paul’s Cathedral. It was the covered crevasses that were the problem. A dog team could have crossed many of them, unaware that they even existed, but a big Sno-Cat could break through a snow bridge several yards thick. The only way to get through a badly crevassed area was to go out on foot and probe for the holes – slow, tiring work. Even so, it was possible to miss some. Snow would suddenly collapse under the front Sno-Cat and it would lunge forwards and downwards, restrained only by the towrope leading back to the heavily laden sledge. Pontoons swung at crazy angles, the vehicle poised over the dark chasm. It could take anything from five to twenty hours using all five vehicles, either heaving or anchoring, to lift it out smoothly.
There were the occasional cocoa breaks during the day, when drivers from different vehicles might come over and chat for a few minutes. Hal Lister and George Lowe held literary lunches in the Weasel cabin; lunch was a buttered biscuit, and their guests would take turns at discussing and describing the books they were each reading at the time.
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