Alert Camp, the world’s most northerly settlement, is supplied only by air since there are no roads for hundreds of miles and all sea access is permanently frozen over. Sixty Canadian soldiers and scientists known as the Chosen Frozen manned the base in six-month stints. On the day of our arrival the temperature was –48°C and the night was pitch black. There would be no sign of the sun for a month. Our own camp, a deserted huddle of four wooden shacks, was perched along the very shore of the frozen sea a mile or so north of the Army camp. Between our huts and the North Pole lay nothing but 425 nautical miles of jumbled ice and black sea-smoke emanating from seams of open sea.
Oliver and Charlie prepared our new snow machines called skidoos. Much lighter than the Groundhogs, they were powered by 640cc two-stroke engines and steered by way of handlebars controlling a single short front ski. Skidoos are the snow traveller’s motorbike: they provide scant protection from the elements.
I practised with my theodolite in a twenty-eight-knot wind at temperatures of –45°C, fairly average conditions for the time of year. One night the shooting of a single star took an hour and fifty minutes. In England I would have shot a dozen in twenty-five minutes. My eyelashes stuck to the metal of the scope and my nose cracked with the first symptoms of frosting. If I carelessly directed my breath on to the scope, even for a second, it froze; if I then wiped its lens with my bare finger, ungloved for even just a few seconds, this brought on circulation problems. Each time I tried to turn my head my beard hairs were tugged by the ice that meshed them, my eyes watered and more ice formed on my lashes which then froze together. But I persevered, for my ability to keep track of our position on the moving ice of the Arctic Ocean, whether by the sun or stars, would be key to our survival. An error of four seconds would put my position wrong by a mile.
We set out on 1 March, a few days before there is any glimpse of the sun at that latitude, and travelled five miles along the shoreline west of our camp before driving on to the sea-ice. A mile later we camped at –51°C, two men to a tent. Geoff tried to send a message back to Ginny, but his Morse key froze up and his breath simply froze on the inside of the fine wire mesh of his microphone. Then the main co-axial power line cable cracked when he tried to straighten it out. Next morning, after an unforgettably evil night, none of the skidoos would start.
During the two months of our North Pole attempt our chartered Twin Otter ski-plane visited us eight times. But there were other days when the pilot did not manage to spot us and returned to Ginny with a glum face and a negative report. Ginny sat at her radios for ten hours a day, often longer, knowing we were passing through areas of unstable breaking ice. She never missed a schedule and at times of major ionospheric disturbance, when even the major Canadian radio stations were blacked out, Ginny would tirelessly change antennae on her high masts, hop from frequency to frequency and tap out or yell out her identification sign hour after hour in the hope we might pick up her call. Out on the ice we were dependent on her ability. In the the tent, hearing her faint Morse signal or, in good conditions, her voice was the happiest moment of any day.
We never tried to drive skidoos and sledges north until we had first prepared a lane with our axes, work we dreaded because of the body sweat it caused which turned to ice particles inside our clothing. A typical stint of axe-work would last nine to eleven hours and clear a skidoo lane of between 500 and 3,000 yards. At first, aware of the dangers of polar bears, we each carried a rifle, but soon dropped the practice through sheer exhaustion. Slipping, sliding and falling into drifts made it difficult enough to manage a shovel and axe without worrying about a rifle as well.
Geoff and Oliver in particular suffered from frost-nipped finger ends. For long minutes in the dark I thought of nothing but my eyes. The eye-pain was a living thing. With a wind chill factor of –120°C the natural liquid in our eyes kept congealing. It was difficult to avoid outbursts of temper and hours of silent hostility in such conditions. For three years in London and four months in comparatively temperate Greenland, relations between us had been idyllic. But the Arctic put an end to the harmony. Any outside observer would have thought we were a close-knit group, but the new level of strain was beginning to get to us. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, describing Scott’s winter party, wrote: ‘The loss of a biscuit crumb left a sense of injury which lasted for a week. The greatest friends were so much on one another’s nerves that they did not speak for days for fear of quarrelling.’
Over the weeks we inched north until the pressure ridges were no longer an unbroken mass. We began to find flat icefloe pancakes where travel was easy and quick flashes of hope, even elation, would then upset my determined cocoon of caution. I experienced exhilaration as the ice flashed by, my sledge leaping like a live thing but settling back on its runners instead of overturning.
During the second week of April the pack-ice showed the first symptoms of break-up. The temperature soared to –36°C and nights of creaking, rumbling thunder gave way to mornings of black or brown steam-mist, a sure sign of newly opened water-leads. For days we crossed open canals and lakes of nilas, which is newly formed dark grey sludge-ice. Winds picked up surface snow and filled the air with the glint of freezing ice particles. White-out conditions resulted when clouds blocked the sun and then we travelled slowly, for navigation was awkward without shadow or perspective. No hole in the ice was visible until you fell into it; no hummock or thirty-foot wall evident until you collided with it. One of us would walk ahead with a prod before the skidoos slowly followed.
Open water, being black, was clearly visible but new ice, mere centimetres thick, was quickly covered by spindrift and formed traps for the unsuspecting. Conventional wisdom has it that white ice is thick and grey thin. I discovered that this was not always true while gingerly exploring a recently fractured ice-pan. The ice felt spongy underfoot at first, then more like rubber. Suddenly the surface began to move beneath my boots, a crack opened up and black water gushed rapidly over the floe, rushing over my boots and weighing down on the fragile new ice. As the water rose to my knees, the crust under my feet cracked apart. I sank quickly but my head could not have been submerged for more than a second since the air trapped under my wolfskin acted as a life-jacket.
The nearest solid floe was thirty yards away. I shouted for the others, but there was no one in earshot. Each time I tried to heave myself up on to a section of the submerged crust, I broke it again. I crawled and clawed and shouted. Under my threshing feet was a drop of 17,000 watery feet down to the canyons of the Lomonosov Ridge. Sailors in the world wars, I recalled, survived one minute on average in the North Sea. I began to tire. My toes felt numb and there was no sensation inside my mitts. My chin, inside the parka, sank lower as my clothes became heavier. I began to panic.
After four, perhaps five minutes, my escape efforts had weakened to a feeble pawing movement when, ecstatic moment, one arm slapped down on to a solid ice chunk and I levered my chest on to a skein of old ice. Then on my thighs and knees. I lay gasping for a few seconds, thanking God, but once out of the water, the cold and the wind bit into me. My trousers crackled as they froze. I tried to exercise my limbs but they were concrete-heavy in the sodden, freezing parka. I trudged robot-like via a solid route back to my skidoo which I could not start. For fifteen minutes I plodded round and round. My mitts were frozen and the individual fingers would not move.
Oliver came along my tracks. He reacted quickly, erecting a tent, starting a cooker, and cutting off my parka, mitts and boots with his knife. Twenty-four hours later, with me in spare clothes and a man-made duvet, we were on our way again. I was lucky to be alive. Few go for a long swim in the Arctic Ocean and survive.
During the latter half of April we pushed hard to squeeze northerly mileage out of each hour’s travel. Only three teams in history had indisputably succeeded in reaching farther north towards the Pole – Plaisted, Herbert and Monzino. By 20 April we had exceeded the records of all previous travellers but these three. On 5 May we passed 87° Nor
th, a mere 180 miles from the Pole. The transpolar drift was what stopped us. The two major currents of the Arctic, the Beaufort Gyral and the Trans-Siberian Drift, meet and diverge somewhere between 87°and 88° of latitude, causing surface chaos, tearing floes apart in places and jumbling others up to heights of thirty feet. On 7 May there were wide canals and slush pools every few hundred yards. The entire region was in motion.
At this point the engine of my skidoo blew a head gasket and we could not progress without a re-supply drop. By the time Ginny had cajoled a ski-plane into dropping a new part we had drifted sixty miles to the south and east and a six-mile belt of sludge surrounded us. We waited for a further week, hoping for a freak temperature drop, but on 15 May, with temperatures rising to 0°C, I decided to call it a day.
Our funds ran out with the flight that extricated us from the floe and took us back to Alert. There Ginny gave me a radio message from London: Prince Charles had agreed to become patron of the main Transglobe Expedition.
The Arctic journey confirmed that the main expedition would have to have its own dedicated Twin Otter ski-plane and crew for re-supply purposes. I spent three years and numerous interviews with big company bosses before finally persuading Lord Hayter of Chubb Fire to sponsor us with the three-year loan of a Twin Otter with skis.
Back in the London office we carried on much as before. But the Arctic journey had humbled me, my first expedition failure. Soon afterwards Mary and Geoff were married and left the expedition. Mary’s place as Ginny’s base camp companion was taken by a young Cumbrian named Simon Grimes. A scruffy-looking man with a black beard, Anton Bowring, applied to join up as a ship’s deck-hand. He was quiet and unflappable. He listened impassively when I explained there was no ship as yet for him to be a deck-hand on. But his first job, to keep him busy, could be to find one. It must be an ice-breaker and free of charge. A year later he located a thirty-year-old ice-strengthened vessel and persuaded the insurance brokers, C.T. Bowring, once owned by his family, to buy her on our behalf. This they did, with an eye to the fact that they had sponsored Captain Scott seventy years previously with his ship, the Terra Nova. Anton recruited sixteen unsalaried but qualified crewmen for his ship which he christened the Benjamin Bowring, after an adventurous ancestor. I was meanwhile lucky enough to obtain the services of Britain’s most skilled Twin Otter polar pilot, Captain Giles Kershaw. The British Army loaned the expedition the services of Gerry Nicholson, an electrical and mechanical engineer specialising in Twin Otter maintenance who had spent time in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey.
By the end of 1978, after six years of unpaid full-time work, we had 1,900 sponsors from eighteen countries, £29 million worth of goods and services support and a team of fifty-two unpaid individuals giving their time and expertise towards Ginny’s dream of the first circumpolar journey round earth.
One summer weekend Ginny’s pet terrier drowned in a slurry pit. For weeks she was inconsolable until a friend turned up with a Jack Russell puppy with which she instantly fell in love. We called him Bothie in honour of his donor whose surname was Booth, and Ginny informed me she was not coming on Transglobe without him.
At Farnborough, in the spring of 1979, Prince Charles opened the Transglobe’s press launch, arriving at the controls of our Twin Otter. He announced that he was supporting the expedition ‘because it is a mad and suitably British enterprise’. Late in the afternoon of 2 September 1979 the Benjamin Bowring left Greenwich with Prince Charles at the helm. He wore a black tie because his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, had been killed three days before by the IRA. There were many people lining the pier. I spotted Geoff who was shouting rude messages at Oliver, and Mary, smiling through her tears. At the end of the jetty Gubbie held up one of his daughters who, with misplaced priorities, was busily waving her arm at the nearby Cutty Sark.
6
The Bottom of the World
On the day we set out from England, Prince Charles commented, ‘Transglobe is one of the most ambitious undertakings of its kind ever attempted, the scope of its requirements monumental.’ The New York Times editorial column, under the heading ‘Glory’, stated, ‘the British aren’t so weary as they’re sometimes said to be. The Transglobe Expedition, seven years in the planning, leaves England on a journey of such daring that it makes one wonder how the sun ever set on the Empire.’
Our initial plans were mundane enough. With three Land Rovers we would cross Europe, the Sahara and West Africa. The ship would take us from Spain to Algeria and again from the Ivory Coast to Cape Town. Departure from Cape Town had to be timed precisely in order to enter Antarctic waters in mid-summer, when the ice-pack should be at its loosest. This was the reason we left England in early September and why we had to leave South Africa by late December.
Anton Bowring’s crew of volunteers were a wonderful bunch, professional at their posts but fairly wild when off duty. They included Quaker, Buddhist, Jew, Christian and atheist, black, white and Asian. They came from Austria, America, both ends of Ireland, South Africa, India, Denmark, Britain, Canada, Fiji and New Zealand. Most of the crew were Merchant Navy men who gave up promising careers, at a time of growing unemployment, to join a three-year voyage with no wage packet. Paul Anderson from Denmark, who had signed on as a deck-hand, had worked with us for a year in the office and on the ship but died of a heart problem just before we left England.
Ginny was not the only female aboard, for Anton had selected an attractive redhead, Jill McNicol, as ship’s cook. She soon gained a number of ardent admirers from among the crew.
In Algiers the port officials showed ominous interest in our three-year supply of sponsored spirits and cigarettes. When the first wave of officers departed, promising a second visit in an hour, our skipper decided to make a run for it and quickly unloaded our vehicles and gear. As the crew waved us goodbye, the Benjamin Bowring’s thirty-year-old variable pitch control jammed itself in reverse. So the vessel retreated out of the harbour and out of sight steaming backwards.
In our three sponsored Land Rovers we drove through Algeria to the sand-dunes of El Golea, a sticky-hot hell-hole dubbed ‘El Gonorrhoea’ by Oliver. We were pleased to leave the sweltering sands and head south to the Hoggar Mountains. At 8,000 feet we reached the Pass of Asekrem, the haunt of French monks. We savoured views of vast mountain ranges disappearing to Chad and the centre of Africa. From Tamanrasset we rattled down ever-worsening trails to lonely Tit and thence over trackless miles of sand and scrub to Tim-Missao and the Touareg lands of the Adrar des Iforas. Wide starry nights and wind-blown dunes brought back memories of the Dhofari Nejd and desert days long past.
From the Forest of Tombouctou to Goundam on the Niger we roared and skidded over dunes of thirty-foot-high sand in low gear to the cheer of barefoot donkeymen in sampan hats driving cavalcades of pint-size mules along the same trail.
At Niafounke we learned that extensive flooding barred our planned route to the Ivory Coast, but a 700-kilometre westerly detour took us at length to Loulouni and the Ivorian border at Ouangolodougou. For a week we camped in thick jungle beside the Bandama Rouge River, an excellent collection point for bilharzia-bearing water-snails, one of Oliver’s tasks for the Natural History Museum, then south to the lush and hilly coastline. In Abidjan harbour, we were met by the Benjamin Bowring. Simon and two members of the crew were weak from malarial fever but we pressed on and sailed across the Equator close by the Greenwich Meridian.
Somewhere off the Namib coast, the Benguela Current coincided with a Force Seven storm. The electrical system of the stern refrigerator room broke down and a ton of sponsored mackerel turned putrescent. Brave hands volunteered to go below and clean up the mess, slipping about, as the ship rolled and heaved, in a soup of bloody fish bits. They fought their way up the ladders and tossed the sloppy bundles of rotten fish overboard. Then a forklift truck burst its lashings, crushed valuable gear and spattered battery acid about the cargo hold. Nowhere on the bucking ship, from cabins to fo’c’sle, could w
e escape the fumes of acid and mackerel. We were in the tropics and there was no air-conditioning system. This was, after all, a ship designed for work at polar temperatures. With each roll to port our cabin porthole spat jets of sea-water on to our bunks. All night the clash of steel on steel and the groan of hemp under stress sounded from the cargo holds.
The old ship struggled on at a stately eight knots and delivered us, slightly dazed, to Saldanha Bay, near Cape Town, on 3 December. Jackass penguins squawked from the rocky shoreline, hundreds of thousands of them, as we anchored to take on fresh water.
We stayed two weeks in Cape Town to mount an export sales-orientated exhibition of our equipment, one of eight such events to be held during the course of the voyage. On a free evening I drove to Constantia with Ginny and visited our old house, built by Granny Florrie thirty-four years before. Nothing was as I remembered it. The valley was no longer the wild and wonderful place of my dreams. Residential expansion had tamed and suburbanised the woods and vineyards. The vlei where I had roamed with Archie and the gang was now a row of neat bungalows for foreign embassy staff. Our own house, Broughton, was a transitory post for US Marines on leave and nobody had tended the garden in years. There was no longer a view of the valley, for Granny Florrie’s shrubs had flourished unchecked and the four little palm trees named after my sisters and me were now roof-high.
The Transglobe Expedition, 1979–82
We wandered in silence through the old vegetable patch. No trace remained of the summerhouse, a place of bewitching memories. My mother’s rockery, tended with so much care and love, had run amok. Up the valley, beside a building lot where caterpillar trucks were at work, we called on my cousin Googi Marais, whose rifle bullets passing over the roof at night had once caused our English nanny to pack her bags and flee. Googi was now crippled with arthritis, but he and his wife gave us tea and filled me in on the past quarter century of happenings in our valley.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 8