Charlie and I saved time daily by never cooking breakfast. We merely drank a mug of coffee from our vacuum flask, heated the night before. This gave us the courage to unzip our bags and climb into our frosted clothes and boots. For seven months we were to remain in precisely the same clothing without washing.
We dragged behind us, man for man, the same weight as Scott and his team. Their aim was to be first to reach the South Pole, ours was to be first to reach both Poles. Like them, we were racing the clock. On 3 March, at –49°C, the blood-red ball of the sun slid briefly along the rim of the sea. Sunlight, although welcome to improve visibility, was our number-one enemy. Ultraviolet rays would now begin to eat at the structure of the pack-ice and, by mid-April, so weaken the ice that the least pressure from the wind would crack up the floes and halt our progress.
At 4.00 a.m. on 4 March, at –40°C, a fire broke out in our stores hut back at Alert. Ginny rushed out with an extinguisher but, ‘It was just one big fireball inside with smoke issuing from the seams in the walls and flames filling the windows . . . There were forty-five gallon drums of fuel stacked by the wall. They had been there for years and were frozen into the ice.’ While they watched, eight drums of gasoline exploded, as did fusillades of rocket flares and 7.62 FN rifle bullets.
Until that point the world’s press had ignored the expedition. Now newspapers and television screens all over the world carried headlines such as ‘Conflagration at Polar Base’ and ‘Polar Expedition in Flames’. After the night of the fire every action we took – and one or two that we didn’t – became news from London to Sydney, from Cape Town to Vancouver.
Seven years beforehand Ginny had argued that I should lay an equipment cache at Tanquary Fjord as well as at Alert – just in case. With the generous help of the Canadian Coastguard’s ice-breaker two years before, we had done so. This meant that the expedition need not now be abandoned. Spare radios, generators, ice rations and skidoo gear were available for our Twin Otter to collect from Tanquary as soon as the weather allowed. I made a mental note to tell Ginny once again she was not just a pretty face.
With enough food for eight days we digested the news of the fire – about which we could do nothing – and concentrated on northerly progress, yard by painful yard. Our shoulders and hips were raw from the rub of the pulk harnesses. My nose, weeping blood and fluid for the last two weeks, was now frost-nipped as well. The rough and frozen material of my facemask chafed the wound and I could no longer wipe away nose-dribble with the back of my mitts, so a sheen of ice, constantly growing in size, covered the bottom half of my facemask, punctured only by the small hole over my mouth.
At night the act of breathing caused the worst discomfort. Generally speaking, polar travel would be quite pleasant if it was not necessary to breathe. When we tried to snuggle down inside our sleeping bags, our breath formed a thick rime of frost where it met cold air. The resulting frost layers cascaded down our necks whenever we moved. To avoid this I blocked both nostrils up with plugs of Kleenex and tried to position my mouth to breathe out of the bag’s hood-hole. This worked well except that my frostbitten nose remained outside the bag’s warmth and, unprotected from the tent’s average temperature of –40°C, was far colder than a deep-freeze.
A storm blew up and shattered the ice-pack. All about us were vast areas of open sea where, for at least the next two months, the ice should have remained largely solid. On the coast behind us, the five-man expedition of our Norwegian rival Ragnar Thorsketh, which had announced its intention to beat us across the Arctic, were astonished to find open sea and no ice at all in sight. They made camp on the land and waited.
Simon and Karl Z’berg located the two skidoos we had abandoned along the coastline and managed to land the Twin Otter beside them. Later they delivered the skidoos and steel sledges to us on a flat floe. Overjoyed at shrugging off the harnesses, we continued by skidoo and were blessed by a patch of good going.
Still travelling at dusk, I swerved to avoid a sudden canal and drove straight into a trench full of shuga porridge-ice. I was flung clear and watched my skidoo sink out of sight within a minute. The steel sledge slowly up-ended but I caught hold of its lashing strap. Charlie ran over in response to my yelling. He attempted to save our tent by removing his mitts in order to undo a lashing buckle. In seconds his fingers began to freeze and, before we could loosen the tent, the sledge disappeared underwater. We saved only our radio and theodolite.
Charlie’s hands were in immediate danger. I erected a makeshift shelter from the tarpaulin with which Charlie used to cover the vehicles and started up the cooker. He spent an hour forcing blood slowly back into his hand and so saved his fingers from anything worse than painfully nipped ends. We passed an extremely uncomfortable night at –40°C under the tarpaulin with one sleeping bag between us.
Two days later Karl found a landing floe half a mile from our location and brought in a skidoo, sledge and gear from Tanquary Fjord. ‘Don’t sink any more skidoos,’ he advised. ‘That’s your last.’
Forty-knot winds battered the pack and we headed north in a semi-white-out. With no visible sun, I followed my compass needle.
On 16 March, with millions of tons of ice on the move all about us, we camped and lay listening to the awe-inspiring boom and crackle of invading floes. The anemometer rose to fifty-five knots and weaker pans fractured all about us, nipped and flaked by their larger jostling neighbours. One crack opened up twenty yards from our tent and cut us off on an island for a day.
Ginny warned me that the press were turning critical. In England the Daily Mail stated that the Transglobe sponsors were considering finding a new leader since our chances of success were looking bad. One reporter interviewed the cameraman on our 1970 Canadian expedition, who said the soldiers on that journey had mutinied and threatened me with knives. In Vancouver, a reporter pointed out that SAS members Fiennes and Burton had cleverly cut themselves off in the Arctic beyond all possible recall by their regiment for service in the Falkland Islands war which was raging at the time.
When the storm died away we packed up in conditions of total white-out and moved off into a curtain of brown gloom, a certain sign of open water. Within minutes I narrowly missed driving into the edge of a river of moving sludge. Charlie and I took a deep breath and spent two perilous days pussy-footing through a sludge swamp, often crossing lakes of half-inch-thick ice which writhed under our skidoos and broke under the sharp runners of the sledges. God was good to us on both days. The next two days passed by in a haze. We pushed on our bruised bodies and mutinous minds and craved more sleep.
My chin was numb one evening when I came into the tent. I must have pulled my frozen facemask off too hard. When thawing the garment out over the cooker and picking ice-bits from around the mouthpiece, I found a one-inch swatch of my beard complete with skin implanted in a bloody patch of iced wool. It took a while to detach this from the mask. Where the skin had torn away from my chin, there was an open patch of raw flesh the size of a penny. In a while my chin warmed up and bled. Then it wept liquid matter which froze once the cooker was turned off.
On 22 March I shot the sun with my theodolite and found the loose pack had drifted us many miles too far east. I applied a 15° westerly correction and we moved on at a good rate. My chin throbbed like a tom-tom by nightfall and, running out of antibiotic cream, I applied some pile cream.
‘He’s got piles on his chin,’ Charlie shrieked with mirth. It was lucky we shared a weird sense of humour. Unlike during the latter part of our Antarctic crossing, there was now no tension between us. I hugely respected and admired his ability to suffer and keep going.
For a week we averaged fifteen miles a day, sometimes travelling for sixteen hours at a time in what we called a double-shuffle. Charlie was frostnipped along the length of his nose and one of my eyelids puffed up with wind-burn. Navigation was becoming more or less instinctive, with or without the sun.
A memorably evil day was 29 March, during which we pushed
to the limits of skidoo travel. Streamers of brown vapour wafted through the overall fog and soft squeaking, grinding sounds emanated from the moving sludge banks we passed. To check each apparently weak section, before charging it on my skidoo, I went ahead gingerly on foot with my ice-prod. Charlie advanced halfway between me and the sledges, calling from time to time when I lost sight of him in the gloom.
When we made it at last to solid ice I felt elated. If we can cross that, I thought, we can go anywhere. We stopped at 87°02′, within nine miles of our most northerly camp in 1977 but forty days earlier in the season. If our aim had been solely to reach the Pole we could have felt reasonably confident.
As we crept north in early April the movement and noise of the floes increased. It seemed as though we were rushing pell-mell, caught in an unseen tidal race, towards the maw of the world, Poe’s maelstrom. For three days the troubled fissure zone of the convergence, the area where the Beaufort Gyral current ends, slowed us to a crawl. For some time we crossed a no-man’s-land where floes spun around in limbo, uncertain which way to go. Then the fringe of the transpolar drift began to take hold of all surface matter and we entered a new gyral with a strong north-easterly pull. A great deal of rubble was piled up in pyramidal heaps within this convergence and at 87°48′ North we were stopped by the bulkiest wall I had ever seen in the Arctic. Rising to thirty feet high, the barrier was well over 100 yards wide. It took us four hours to axe and four to cross.
After the convergence we entered a sixty-mile region of fissures and high barriers. On 8 April we crossed sixty-two sludge cracks, often by shovelling snow into the water and then ramming the resulting weak bridge before it sank.
Twenty miles short of the Pole the going improved dramatically. At mid-day on 10 April I carefully checked our noon latitude and each subsequent mile until we were at 90° North. I had no wish to overshoot the top of the world. We arrived there at 11.30 p.m. GMT and passed the news to Ginny early on Easter Day 1982. We had become the first men in the world to have travelled the earth’s surface to both Poles.
Apprehension about what lay ahead overshadowed any sense of achievement that we may otherwise have felt, for the Benjamin Bowring was still many cold months beyond our horizon.
I aimed south along a line some 15° east of the Greenwich Meridian. We changed to a routine of travel by night and sleep by day so that the sun would project my body’s shadow ahead and prove a natural sundial.
As we left the Pole, the Transglobe crew steamed from Southampton harbour en route for Spitsbergen.
Over 1,000 miles still separated us from the latitude to which the Benjamin Bowring might, with luck, be expected to smash her way when, in August, the pack was at its most penetrable. The Benjamin Bowring would not be able to penetrate heavy Arctic pack, being merely an ice-strengthened vessel, but, if we could reach as far down as 81° North, she might – through the skill of her skipper and the eyes of Karl in the Twin Otter – be able to thread her way into the pack’s edge.
From the Pole all went well for four days – in reality, nights – during one of which we achieved a distance of thirty-one miles in twelve hours over a freakishly unbroken pan of floes. From 88° down to 86° the conditions deteriorated slowly with an increasing number of open leads. I had grown accustomed to keeping an eye ever open for potential Twin Otter landing strips. But for the last forty miles there had been neither a single floe flat enough for a landing nor a pan solid enough to camp on safely during a storm.
The temperature rose to –20°C and stayed there. New ice no longer congealed over open leads within twenty-four hours, so wide canals with no crossing-points became permanent stoppers, not mere hold-ups. Tedious foot patrols to find crossing-points became increasingly necessary. Following a brief storm on 23 April we axed for two hours through a forest of twelve-foot-high green rafted blocks and reached a series of winding couloirs of new ice packed with black pools of sludge. Alongside this marsh I tripped and fell. My hands shot out to ward off a heavy fall. My axe disappeared and sank. My arms pierced the surface up to the elbows and one leg up to the knee, but the snow-covered sludge held my body weight. Seven miles later seawater cut us off in all directions except back north, so we camped. The wind blew at thirty knots and chunks of ice, floating across pools and along canals, all headed east.
That night I told Charlie I would begin to search for a floe on which to float south. He was horrified, feeling we would never reach the ship if we did not make much more southerly progress before beginning to float. Stop now, he feared, and the expedition would fail. I argued with him that wind and current should take us to 81° before winter, providing we could only locate a solid enough floe to protect us during storm-crush conditions. If we waited one day too long before locating such a floe we could easily be cut off on a rotten pan and then there would be no answer to our predicament. Better safe than sorry. Charlie agreed to disagree. But, he reminded me, in the future – whatever happened – I should remember the decision to risk a float from so far north was mine alone.
Two days later we escaped from the weak pan and managed to progress another five miles south on increasingly thin ice before having to camp. Four days later I thought the river-ice had congealed and attempted to cross by skidoo. To my surprise my sledge runners broke through the sludge at a point where I had safely walked an hour earlier. Thereafter this sludge-river remained at the same tacky consistency, insufficient for sledge weight. The temperature rose towards 0° and we ground to a halt.
Charlie searched for cracks and weak points on the floe we were on and eventually decided upon a line of hummocks along the impact point of an old pressure ridge. We flattened out the top of this high ground with axes and made a camp there.
During the first week of May I asked Ginny to send us two light canoes and rations for a long float. She flew with Karl and Simon from Alert to the north-east corner of Greenland and at remote Cape Nord set up her last radio base. She told me that the remnants of the Norwegian expedition racing us to cross the Arctic had reached the Pole too late to continue and had been evacuated.
On 11 May, without a sound, our floe split apart 500 yards east of our tent and we lost a third of our original real-estate. Bending over the edge of the newly opened canal, I saw that our two-thirds was some five or six feet thick. I had hoped for a minimum of eight feet but – too bad – we were committed to this place.
Our tent floor of axed ice was uneven and daily became more sodden with water as the surface of the floe melted down. Soon, all about our slightly raised platform, the floe became a floating pool of vivid blue salt-water, five feet deep in places.
Late in May two members of our London committee travelled to Spitsbergen to visit the ship. Karl flew them over the pack and, horrified at our overall predicament, they returned to London and warned the committee that our chances of success this summer were minimal. We must be airlifted out at once while such a course was still possible or any subsequent disaster would be on their hands. Ginny queried the committee’s follow-up message, a direct evacuation order, and rallied those in London who were against such a course. Only when the order had been softened to a recommendation that we abort the float but that the final decision should be mine, did Ginny inform me.
I felt, and Charlie agreed, that there was still a strong chance of success without risking an international search-and-rescue operation, so we continued to float at the mercy of wind and current. For five days a southerly storm blew us back towards the Pole and for several days our southerly heading veered sharply towards Siberia, but overall we continued south at a steady rate towards Fram Strait, between Greenland and Spitsbergen. Karl managed to land on a rare mist-free day. He dropped us off two tents, two canoes and a two-month supply of rations. He warned us that in another week he would no longer be able to take off from our increasingly soggy floe. We were on our own. On 6 June in thick fog our floe was blown against its northerly neighbour and, where the ice fronts clashed, a fifteen-foot-high wall of broken bl
ocks reared up.
The sense of smell of the polar bear is phenomenal: they can detect a seal from ten miles away. Large males weigh half a ton, reach eight feet tall and tower to twelve feet when standing. They glide over ice quietly, yet can charge at thirty-five miles per hour.
One night in my sleeping bag I was woken by loud snuffling sounds beside my head on the other side of the tent cloth.
‘Ran?’ Charlie called.
Since his voice came from his own tent I knew with a sinking feeling that he was not snuffling about outside my tent. It must be a bear. Grabbing camera and loaded revolver, I peered outside. So did Charlie, whose eyeballs grew huge as he spotted – behind my tent – a very big bear. I craned my neck and three yards away saw the face of the bear which was licking its lips with a large black tongue. We photographed the fine animal and after a few minutes it shuffled away.
A week later another bear would not leave and showed signs of evil intent. We fired bullets and even a parachute flare over its head but the bear only grew irritable. We agreed to shoot if it approached closer than thirty yards. It did, so I fired a bullet at its leg. The bear hesitated in mid-stride then broke sideways and loped away. There were blood splashes but no sign of a limp. Over the next few weeks many bears crossed our floe and eighteen visited our camp, tripping over our guy-ropes. This kept us from getting bored by our inactive existence.
The uncertainty of our situation, especially at times when communications blacked out, was a great strain on Ginny. She had a long history of migraines and spastic colon attacks and her life at Nord was full of pain and stress. She had no shoulder to cry on and no one from whom to seek advice. She hated this part of the expedition but kept steadily on at her job. Late in June she made contact with the Benjamin Bowring. The sooner she could remove us from our floe the better, for the remnant of our floe was fast approaching a danger area known as the Marginal Ice Zone, the ice pulverisation factory of Fram Strait. Two million square miles of the Arctic Ocean are covered by pack-ice and one-third of this load is disgorged every year through Fram Strait. Very soon now our own floe would enter this bottleneck, where currents accelerate by 100 per cent and rush their fragmenting ice burden south at an incredible thirty kilometres a day. Keenly aware of our danger, the skipper and crew agreed to take a risk. Arctic pack-ice is far more hazardous than the Antarctic equivalent.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 13