Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  The only change in the routine came when a day, or part of a day, was devoted to maintenance. This happened all too often, for the tracks had to be greased every few hundred miles. This was a hideous job, for the grease, congealed by the cold, resisted all pressure to pump it into the frozen nipples on the tracks. If you got any grease on your anorak, and it was almost inevitable that you did, the windproof quality of that particular patch was lost for ever; you had to lie in the snow, crawl under the vehicle, bend contorted to reach round awkward corners, all in the bitter cold. For someone like myself who is unmechanical, the very thought is appalling, and yet the crews became fond of their charges, attributing to them an almost human character as they coaxed and struggled with their foibles on the long drive across the Antarctic.

  Fuchs, at last, reached South Ice – the depot and advanced base they had established the previous year – on 21 December. Unemotional as ever, he quickly diffused any euphoria amongst his team with the admonishment as they approached the little hut covered in snow: ‘Well, there it is. We’re going in now. And don’t forget – no looting.’

  And, as Fuchs addressed his little team, Hillary had actually set out on the last leg of his dash for the Pole. He had fulfilled all his duties in reaching and supervising the stocking by air of Depot 700. By this time the Weasel had come to a grinding halt, but the three farm tractors were still going strong. Even so, some members of Hillary’s team were worried about their prospects. Now out of range of aerial support, they were wondering what would happen if their way was barred by soft snow or extensive crevasse systems. George Marsh and Bob Miller wanted to explore the region around Depot 700, but to do this effectively they needed another depot put in by the tractors. Hillary suspected this was a ploy to deflect him from the Pole and felt that it would be just as easy to put in a depot from the air. They spent a day talking round the pros and cons, the one thing remaining fixed in Hillary’s mind being the determination to make a push for the Pole, even if it meant taking just one tractor. He felt that he had fulfilled his duties as the leader of a big scientific expedition, with the prime task of supporting Vivian Fuchs’ crossing. Now he was the climber, sitting in the top camp, with the summit in sight. He talked the others round to his view and they resolved to go for the Pole.

  They set out on 20 December with the three tractors. That evening there was a message from his Committee, forbidding him to go beyond Depot 700. Since he was already beyond it, he chose to ignore the directive, sending a message to Fuchs that he was heading for the Pole, the first time that he had actually declared his intention.

  They stormed on through soft snows and heavily crevassed regions, travelling twenty-four hours at a go, taking turns at the stressful job of making the route out in front, swapping the driving between the five men who were now divided between the three tractors. On Christmas Day they paused to listen to a special Christmas broadcast from New Zealand and to eat a Christmas dinner washed down by brandy. It was warm and cosy in the caboose. They were now about 250 miles from the Pole.

  Fuchs and his party were still at South Ice, where the entire team managed to cram into the little hut, now buried in snow, for their Christmas dinner. The following day Fuchs sent a message to Hillary, asking him to put in another depot between Depot 700 and the Pole, which would mean abandoning all attempts at going to the Pole. Hillary commented:

  ‘I didn’t have to do much figuring. We had just enough fuel to reach either the Pole or back to Depot 700. The only way we could establish a depot was to stop and sit where we were – and hope that Bunny would arrive when our food ran out. It would be a lot easier – and safer – to fly some more fuel into Depot 700. Or get a few drums deposited at the Pole by the Americans. I had the unkind suspicion that this was an excuse to stop us going on to the Pole without actually telling us not to.’

  Hillary ignored the edict and kept going. It was savagely cold; the snow was soft and their progress worryingly slow. He abandoned everything that was not absolutely essential, paring down their food and fuel to the bare minimum needed to reach the Pole, and still they pushed on. At last, on 4 January, they sighted a tiny black dot in the distance – then another, and another; it was the line of marker flags leading them to the Pole, where the Americans had an International Geophysical Year base. He had reached his summit, with the minimum of reserves to spare. They were tired and hungry, had only twenty gallons of fuel left, but that did not matter for they had achieved their objective. There was no scientific or geographical purpose in their dash; it was an adventurous self-indulgence that any climber would find irresistible. Hillary wrote:

  ‘What did we achieve by our Southern journey? We had located the crevasse areas and established the route and we had been the first vehicle party to travel overland to the South Pole – that was something, I suppose. But we had produced no scientific data about the ice, and little information about its properties. We showed that if you were enthusiastic enough and had good mechanics you could get a farm tractor to the South Pole – which doesn’t sound much to risk your life for. The press had a field day on the pros and cons of our journey, but for me the decision had been reasonably straightforward. I would have despised myself if I hadn’t continued – it was as simple as that – I just had to go on.’

  How different were Fuchs’ motives. A great deal of invaluable scientific work was done both by Fuchs on his side of the continent and also by the large scientific contingent attached to Hillary’s support party. But the journey itself was an adventure, similar in concept to sailing round the world or making the traverse of a mountaintop. Fuchs claimed that his reasons for crossing Antarctica were those of scientific curiosity but, by making it a single dramatic push from one side to the other, there was undoubtedly a conflict between the needs of a comprehensive scientific programme and the exigencies of a tight schedule. It could be argued that more would have been achieved if the traverse had been spread over several years. As it was, they did manage to make a series of seismic soundings of the depth of the ice cap, but the other scientific work was inevitably of a fairly perfunctory nature. Hal Lister, the glaciologist, admitted rather ruefully that he had to fit his own programme, of examining snow and ice layers immediately below the surface, into periods when the expedition happened to pause for maintenance or some other purpose. I suspect that Fuchs, the scientist and Antarctic explorer, was after all not so very different from Ed Hillary in his motivation.

  But Fuchs was still 380 miles from the Pole and the Antarctic autumn was approaching. At the Pole, Hillary was becoming more and more worried by Fuchs’ slow progress. He was haunted by the appalling spectre of spending another winter in Antarctica. He had done his job, had achieved his goal, and wanted to go home to his family. Already he had been away for over a year, average by polar standards, but a long time to a mountaineer whose expeditions are unlikely to last for more than six months. Hillary’s two mechanics, Murray Ellis and Jim Bates, stated categorically that it was getting too late in the season and that under no circumstances were they prepared to wait for Fuchs to arrive at the Pole. Hillary, therefore, sent Fuchs a message, suggesting that on reaching the South Pole, Fuchs should fly out for the winter, leaving his vehicles behind, and then return the following summer to complete the journey. This, of course, was completely unacceptable to Fuchs, who immediately replied, ‘Appreciate your concern but there can be no question of abandoning journey at this stage. Innumerable reasons make it impracticable to remount the expedition after wintering outside Antarctica. Our vehicles can be and have been operated at –60 °C but I do not expect such temperatures in March.’

  Fuchs called one of his rare expedition meetings and read out both Hillary’s message and his own reply. In Lowe’s words, ‘There was no discussion of either the message or the decision – and we drove on. Nobody in the party had the slightest wish to postpone our crossing of the continent; on that score we were in full accord with our leader.’

  It was unfortunate that a copy of H
illary’s message was released to the press by his Committee in New Zealand. It had been meant as a helpful suggestion, but the press, who already had had a field day in creating a ‘race for the Pole’ between Fuchs and Hillary, with the big question of whether Hillary was disobeying orders, now had the sniff of another controversy in the doubts expressed about Fuchs’ ability to complete the trip that year. Fuchs, as always, remained aloof. He had stated that he was going to finish the trip that year and, as far as he was concerned, that was enough. Hillary accepted Fuchs’ decision and offered his services as guide once Fuchs’ reached the Pole. He did not wait there, however, but flew back to Scott Base for a few days’ rest.

  Fuchs pressed on, now making very much better progress, the going being over reasonably firm snow and free of crevasses. On 19 January, the small convoy of vehicles, bedecked in flags and bunting, reached the Pole at last. In that moment of intense excitement, as the vehicles cruised up to the little collection of huts that marked the South Pole Base, and as Fuchs jumped out of the leading vehicle to be greeted by Ed Hillary and Admiral Dufek, Commander of the Americans in the Antarctic, George Lowe was still baffled, downright exasperated by the enigmatic Fuchs. ‘Bunny Fuchs was like the profile of the continent itself – tough, flat, unchanging, dogged; and after three years in his company I could not say I knew him.’

  In many ways, Fuchs’ own appraisal of himself mirrors Lowe’s observations. Fuchs told me in the summer of 1980:

  ‘I don’t allow things to unbalance me; I try to keep a steady course. Some people say this is very uninteresting. George, for instance, actually said to me, “Come on. Why is it that you never seem to get enthusiastic about anything?” I said, “You mean you want Caesar to exhort his troops?” And he said, “Well, something like that”. I said, “Well, if we get into a state of euphoria we’re going to make mistakes just as much as we would if we get into a state of melancholia. As far as I’m concerned we just proceed and things come to pass. No need to get excited about it!”’

  And proceed they did. After a few days at the South Pole, sleeping in warm beds, eating gigantic meals in the American mess hall and working on the Sno-Cats, they were ready to start once again.

  The significance of the Pole was strange. Unlike the top of a mountain, it was merely a geographical point on the Antarctic plateau, barely halfway across in journey terms. The presence of a hutted camp, with many of the comforts of civilisation, made it all the more bizarre. And yet there was a feeling of having reached a top, certainly one that Hillary had felt and one that Fuchs’ party could also share. Even though the journey from the Pole to Scott Base had some very difficult and heavy ground to cross, it had the qualities of the downhill run on known ground, with the tracks of Hillary’s vehicles marking the way. Hillary himself flew into Depot 700 to help guide them to the head of the Skelton Glacier and then down it. Even so, this was the most exhausting part of the journey. Racing against the Antarctic winter, they still stopped at regular intervals to make their seismic soundings of the ice cap. They were beginning to get run down and tired, all too ready to end their journey.

  At last, on 2 March, the four Sno-Cats, the only vehicles to complete the entire crossing, rolled into Scott Base. They had travelled 2,158 miles across the Antarctic continent. Vivian Fuchs had estimated that it would take them a hundred days. He had completed the journey in ninety-one.

  – Chapter 14 –

  The Longest Polar Journey

  Wally Herbert’s team cross the Arctic Ocean, 1968–1969

  The two poles provide parallels but also extreme contrasts, as opposite to each other as their seasons, when the perpetual darkness of midwinter at one Pole is contrasted by the continuous glare of summer sun on the other. In common they have the cold, the wind, the snows and the ice, but that is all. The South Pole is set on an ice cap 9,386 feet thick, in the heart of a huge continent. The North Pole is in the midst of an ice-clad ocean, a gigantic jigsaw of shifting ice floes, whose geography is in constant flux, dictated by the surge of the seas beneath and around the ice. Floes are split, then subdivided again and again; great floes are swept together, one climbing on to another, a microcosm of the action of the drift of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Pressure ridges of ice blocks are hurled up as the floes crash and grind together. From the air the line of a pressure ridge seems little more than a few ripples, but to a man standing on the bucking ice it has all the threat and violence of a severe earthquake.

  The interior of Antarctica is the most sterile, empty desert in the world. There is no life, no vegetation, not even lichen, just snow, ice and barren rock. There is, however, life in the Arctic, nurtured by the black seas beneath the ice. Fish provide food for the seals, and polar bears stalking the seals have been spotted wandering in the remotest parts of the Arctic Ocean, far from solid land. But this animal life cycle is insufficient to sustain man. As in the Antarctic, he must carry his food and fuel with him as he combats the fierce cold, the glare of the long summer and the dark of winter. In the Antarctic there are the dangers of hidden crevasses, while in the Arctic there is the ever-shifting sea, the threat of your shelter being split in two, of falling into the icy waters, or being engulfed in the gigantic grinder of a shifting pressure ridge.

  The heroic age of exploration at both Poles was around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but while the Antarctic has a theme of conventional heroism, of good teamwork and good chaps where, even in disaster, they died with a stiff upper lip leaving the right kind of message, in the Arctic there has always been a strain of the contentious that goes back to the earliest efforts to find the fabled North-West Passage. There are tales of mutiny, of cannibalism, of disintegration. In the story of the first men to reach the North Pole there is an ugly dispute that has not been fully resolved even today.

  In many ways, Robert Edwin Peary was of the same mould as Captain Scott or Ernest Shackleton. An officer in the Civil Engineer Corps of the US Navy, he devoted a large part of his adult life to Arctic exploration in Northern Greenland and then to his efforts to reach the North Pole. A gruff, outspoken man, he was weak in both tact and diplomacy, but was almost obsessively thorough and very determined. His attempt in 1909 was carefully planned, using a combination of Eskimo experience of the Arctic and the modern technology of the time. His specially designed ship, Roosevelt, sailed as far north as possible into the ice before the arrival of winter. Early the following spring he set out using a series of trail-breaking parties to force the way for him to a point just 153 miles from the Pole. Then, with his manservant, Henson, and four Eskimos, he cut loose to push through to the Pole in the space of five days’ hard sledging. It was only on his way back home he learned that Frederick A. Cook, who had been his doctor on his first polar expedition, had claimed to have reached the Pole a full year before.

  Cook’s story was certainly remarkable. He claimed to have set out from the north point of Axel Heiberg Island, 520 miles from the Pole, with four Eskimos. Two of them returned after a few days, leaving the threesome to make their push for the Pole. Cook claimed to have reached it on 21 April 1908, but there were many discrepancies in his claim. How could he have carried all the food that the three of them, plus the dogs, would need for the length of time he claimed they took to get there and back? He had lost all the paperwork of his navigational readings, having left his instruments on his way out with a member of Peary’s party. Cook claimed that they vanished, while Whitney, the man who had accepted Cook’s belongings, denied there had ever been any written records and claimed he had only been given instruments. Two factions quickly formed, each bent on discrediting the other. The problem is that there is no way anyone can prove he has been to the Pole. It is not like a mountain, where, except in the worst weather, photographs can give positive evidence that the climber has reached the top. It all comes down to credibility. In the end Cook’s story was dismissed, not just on the evidence or lack of it, but also in the light of earlier claims he had made to
have climbed Mount McKinley for the first time – a claim which was also discredited. Peary was given official recognition and his name appears in all atlases today, though even in his case the proof was not conclusive. His average progress rate while breaking trail with support parties had never exceeded twelve miles a day and yet, once he pushed forward with Henson and his four Eskimo companions, he claimed to have averaged twenty-five miles a day, both on the way to the Pole and all the way back to Roosevelt. This was remarkable if compared with the progress of others; Nansen, one of the greatest Arctic travellers, had only once managed to travel twenty-five miles in a day on polar pack ice.

  It is probable that the North Pole was still untouched until it was invaded by modern technology, when man could reach it not only from the air but also by nuclear submarine, and USS Nautilus cruised beneath it on 3 August 1958, only a few months after Fuchs had completed his crossing of Antarctica. But no one had reached the North Pole across the surface since Peary made his bid in 1909 and the greatest journey of all – a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean – was still untried.

  It was this concept that captured the imagination of Wally Herbert. A luxuriant beard and a quiet intensity of manner, eyes wrinkled from gazing into the wind and glare of the snows on the British Antarctic Survey, give Herbert the unmistakeable stamp of a polar explorer. Born in 1934, he was the son of an army officer who had risen up from the ranks.

  By the age of fourteen he was dreaming of being an explorer, but there seemed little chance of realising this ambition. His father, with whom he had a strained relationship, partly no doubt because of his long absences, wanted him to go into the army. But Wally felt uncomfortable with what he had already seen of life in the officers’ mess. He told me: ‘I was given a kind of grooming in officer’s behaviour; I would have to play billiards with the captains and talk politely with the CO, dress for dinner and all that sort of thing. It was a deadly, deadly way of spending your holidays as a teenage lad.’