Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  One day Mike produced from his science pack two small bottles of very expensive water for us to drink in the interest of his urine sample analysis. He told me not to spill any because each bottleful cost hundreds of pounds, and it was like atomic heavy water, but non-radioactive. I never ceased to admire Mike’s dedication to his research work. One of his science projects measured our calorific experience. The results were startling: ‘When we made the ascent to the plateau, the isotopes gave daily energy expenditure of 10,670 calories in Ran and 11,650 in me. They confirmed the highest maintained energy expenditures ever documented – values that must lie close to the physiological limit.’

  On our sixtieth day Mike had a very bad time and told me he must be wrong about the effects of altitude. He was worried within himself about his ability to continue fending off negative thoughts. He wrote: ‘Last night I did express to Ran my fears of not being able to hack it if things go badly. Needless to say I got a sort of “we will be tough” type talk rather than true understanding. He gets his strength from “God and family and the whole clan here inside me”. All very useful but I know it won’t help me if I can see the whole chance of success slipping away and us just slogging on.’

  That night I gave Mike two chocolate squares and he seemed to appreciate the gesture. I am not good at being sympathetic. I knew that Mike was agnostic and did not expect him to gain any mental help in that direction. I had hoped, however, that he might be able to invoke his family and the knowledge that they were all gunning for him but he seemed to scoff at this as too contrived a mental aid.

  My practice was to hype up my mind during the first hour of every day, when the pain from my feet was at its worst, by simply remembering that I was not alone in facing the dreaded hours ahead. I pictured my grandfather who had trapped in northern Canada and fought for his country all over the world. I thought of my father and uncle who were killed in the two world wars. I pictured my wife, my mother and my sisters and I knew that all of them were right behind me, helping to suppress the ever-lurking urge to put a stop to the pain and the cold by giving up.

  The last 200 miles before the Pole involved us in climbing above 10,000 feet. The altitude effects added to our debilitation and the loads were beginning to change us in many subtle ways. Mike reached the end of his tether, grinding to a halt in his tracks, head lolling, as if he were about to succumb to hypothermia. I set up the tent, got the cooker going and he accepted a mug of tepid soup in a trance. My mind was in a turmoil. I had little doubt but that he was pushing himself far too hard. I was doing likewise. We had no alternative. We had to earn our daily ration with the mileage put behind us.

  On our sixty-eighth day the wind dropped and the mists cleared. Towards evening there was a thing ahead. For the first time in over 700 miles a man-made object was visible in the snow. Could it be the Pole? The item turned out to be a half-buried meteorological balloon. After seven hours’ hauling on 16 January, on the eighty-first anniversary of Scott’s sad arrival at the same point, we topped the final rise and came to the South Pole. The journey was far from over but we had dragged to the Pole just enough stores to allow us to cross the continent and survive. If our luck held. It was a moment of sheer elation. Especially so for Mike, who had not been selected back in 1985 when Roger Mear was finalising his Pole team.

  All the isolation of the past months fell away. The polar site had vastly altered, even in the twelve short years since my last visit. Strangely shaped installations on jacked-up steel legs reared monstrously in every direction from the main black-roofed dome in which over-wintering scientists lived and worked. A small huddle of nine figures had come out to greet us, but we put aside thoughts of the food available in the dome canteen as we forced ourselves to continue north. In all, we paused at the Pole for only eighty minutes.

  Only then, beyond the Pole, did we discover the true meaning of cold. Our condition in terms of body deterioration, slow starvation, inadequate clothing, wind chill temperature, altitude, and even the day of the year, exactly matched those of Scott and his four companions as they came away from the Pole in 1912.

  We learned from Morag that Erling Kagge had reached the Pole before us and had been airlifted out the previous week. The Norwegian press talked of his winning the race, but our sledges were twice as heavy and our journey twice as long so our morale was not too badly dented by this misleading piece of media spin.

  Descent from the Antarctic Plateau to the Pacific Ocean

  I could sense that Mike was in a bad way, despite his continued power surges. I knew that even now he would never recognise that his pace was his own worst enemy. I would never be able to ‘bully’ him into copying my polar plod. I could only try to compromise with him over matters of pace wherever necessary. I had my own mounting problems with harness sores, diarrhoea and haemorrhoids, and the most agonising throbbing pain in my feet. Mike diagnosed possible bone infection and put me on antibiotics. I realised how lucky I had been for fifty years in experiencing little pain. Broken bones and teeth, torn-off digits, frostbite and chronic kidney stones had seemed unpleasant at the time. But now I knew real pain and I feared lest it overwhelm me.

  On 30 January we recorded our first barometric descent of a few hundred feet, but this welcome news was balanced by a potentially disastrous discovery. Mike had lost both his ski sticks off his sledge. Trying to share mine and progress with one each was unbalancing, and when Mike again fell behind, I gave him both, but he was once more on the edge of hypothermia and we had to camp early. Our bodily condition was becoming highly suspect. I was not in the business of leading suicide expeditions. We were approaching the edge of our ability to cope safely with very extreme conditions and this was, we both knew, because we were starving, losing ten ounces every day through a deficiency of 3,000 calories each and every day for three months.

  The next day Mike began to work out a satisfactory way of forcing his sledge to move with just one stick and I constantly checked the compass for I knew we would need great accuracy to enter the Mill Glacier, the start of the long descent from the plateau to the Pacific coast. Mike and I needed to make no mistakes from now on. We were committed to the 9,000-foot descent as if in a rubber boat at the moment of yielding to the first pull of a great rapid. The horizons which now opened to us were awesome, a sprawling mass of rock and ice in motion. These were the headwaters of a slow-moving ice-river. Huge open chasms leered ahead and standing ice-waves reared up at the base of black truncated cliffs.

  I scanned the skies north and saw no clouds. So long as the good visibility conditions remained, I could find the best route. I felt a God-given confidence and, for the first time on this journey, the warm pleasure of challenge. I knew the rules. Never waste a minute. Pause for nothing. Here there could be no place for my polar plod. So long as the weather held we must go like the wind. This was the region of monster holes described by Cherry-Garrard as ‘vast crevasses into which we could have dropped the Terra Nova with ease’.

  We came at last to where the Mill joins the Beardmore Glacier and another breathtaking vista opened up. Messner and Fuchs, the only others to have attempted our route, had lost their way at this point. We had to cope with more crevasses, interrupted for a while by a field of sharp sastrugi. Unable to cross these with my skis on, I made the fatal error of unclipping and strapping them to my sledge. The very first crevasse bridge I attempted to cross without skis was a minor affair, no more than four feet wide and similar to hundreds we had safely traversed. Because my harness waistband was unfastened the sledge ropes did not restrain me as they should have done and my abrupt plunge into the dark shaft was halted only by the thin webbing strap of my ski stick looped over my right wrist.

  I dangled for a moment more surprised than frightened. The fear came as soon as I realised that only my ski stick, wedged above me and still fastened to my wrist, was postponing my imminent demise. Any movement that dislodged the stick was liable to send me downwards. Throwing caution to the winds, I lunged upwards
with my free hand, my feet scrabbling against each smooth ice-wall. With my arm strength sapping, I lifted my body high enough to reach the crevasse lip with my mitted hand and then to heave my chest over to safety. For a minute I lay shaking with relief until, with dismay, I realised that my stick and the other mitt in its wrist loop were loose down the hole. I inched to one side until I could squint down, my breath rushing out in a sigh of relief as I spotted the ski stick now loosely lodged some four feet down. Using my boots as grabs, I managed to retrieve both stick and vital mitt.

  A few days later we strayed into a treacherous crevasse field, as lethal as any Marxist minefield, but our guardian angels saw us through successive obstacles of a hairy nature. At last we reached a steep slope some 500 feet above the edge of the Ross Ice-shelf and pitched our ninetieth camp. We were within half a mile of having walked over the highest, coldest, most inhospitable continent on earth from Atlantic to Pacific. How much longer did we stand a chance of surviving? Since all our main aims were now achieved, the only practical rationale for continuing must be to reach the ship before its departure in eight days’ time.

  On our ninety-second travel day, clear of crevasses at last, we hauled for ten and a half hours over the floating Ross Ice-shelf. On 12 February, our ninety-fifth day of travel, the last US aeroplane left Antarctica. In five days our ship would steam out of the Ross Sea. We were still 289 nautical miles from Ross Island. The time for procrastination was over. I radioed the Twin Otter which picked us up from the ice forty miles ‘out to sea’ on the Pacific Ocean.

  Mike wrote in his diary that evening:

  While Ran made the radio call for our pick-up, I went and stood outside. Our tent was pitched in the middle of a huge white plain and the sun was shining. To the south, a thin line ran back from where I stood to disappear beyond the horizon, towards mountains and wind-sluiced valleys. There it ran back up the glacier and then due south to the Pole. It continued on – straight for the rest of the plateau, and dropped tortuously through valleys, dune and sastrugi to the ice-shelf on the far side and so to the Atlantic coast. It was the longest unbroken track that any man had ever made.

  We will never know how much farther we could have continued over the ice-shelf because there are too many ifs and buts. As it was, our achievement took us into the Guinness Book of Records and Mike and I were awarded OBEs. If, like Scott, we had had no option but to battle on, it is my opinion that we would have died short of Ross Island.

  Scott’s modern detractors make much of his stupidity in championing manhaul travel over the use of dogs. Amundsen’s colleague Hanssen is often quoted as concluding: ‘What shall one say of Scott and his companions who were their own sledge dogs? Anyone with any experience will take his hat off to Scott’s achievement. I do not believe men ever have shown such endurance at any time, nor do I believe there ever will be men to equal it.’ All attempts for a century, whether by Norwegians, Russians or Americans, to cross the continent unaided and using snow-machines or dog teams had failed miserably. In hauling our own loads across this area, greater in mass by far than the United States, we have shown that manpower can indeed be superior to dog-power and, in doing so, have partly exonerated Scott’s much-abused theories on the matter.

  Our record in the Guinness Book simply states: ‘The longest totally self-supporting polar sledge journey ever made and the first totally unsupported crossing of the Antarctic landmass was achieved by R. Fiennes and M. Stroud. They covered a distance of 2,170 km (1,350 miles).’

  A year later various types of kites and para-wings emerged that enabled Antarctica to be crossed with far less effort in a mere fifty days. Now it is possible to traverse both Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean with no outside support by harnessing the wind with lightweight sails. A sledger, using modern kites, can pick up and harness winds from over 180°. Until 1994 the great journeys of Shackleton and his successors, including Mike and me, made use of crude sails which could only run before a directly following wind. Should Mike and I have described our 1993 expedition, or Shackleton’s for that matter, as ‘unsupported’ when we harness the wind, albeit in a minimal way? It is a question of definition, for there is, after all, no polar version of the International Olympic Committee.

  11

  How Not to Get Old?

  The media in Britain reacted to our Antarctic journey in a mostly positive vein, but there are always some who will rattle on about the point of it all. Few people bother to write to counterattack columnists unless they feel very strongly. Several letters bounced back this time, including one from John Hunt, the leader of the first ascent of Mount Everest, who reprimanded The Independent’s Margaret Maxwell: ‘It ill becomes Ms Maxwell to question the motives underlying this astonishing feat of human endurance and courage . . . Surely at a time when, as never before, we need to develop these qualities in the young generation, this story should be accepted at its face value, as a shining example to Britain’s youth.’

  Various letters also flurried between the polar pundits as to precisely what had been the previous record. Dr Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith, a great polar traveller of the 1950s, wrote: ‘Shackleton’s party, without support, covered a distance of 1,215 statute miles. They picked up depots laid by themselves on the outward leg of the same march. It is this record that they have broken. All honour belongs to both Sir Ernest’s and Sir Ranulph’s parties, men of different eras whose achievements approached the limits of endurance. Comparisons are superfluous if not impossible to make.’

  Another aspect which exercised the media was a supposed falling out between Mike and myself. It is as if the press cannot believe two people can survive great dangers together without being at each other’s throats with recriminations immediately afterwards. Sometimes it is the newspapers that help bring this state of affairs about. Reinhold Messner and Arved Fuchs completed their supported crossing of Antarctica in a reasonably friendly fashion but Stern magazine contrived to portray Fuchs as the quiet hero and Messner the villain which drove a fatal wedge between them. Roger Mear and Robert Swan managed things better. After their 1985 South Pole journey they maintained what Mear called ‘an outward pretence of cohesion’, but in their joint book they were open and honest about one another’s failings and their relationship did not degenerate into a mud-slinging match that would ruin whatever mutual feelings of respect had withstood the journey itself.

  For eighteen years of polar expeditions Charlie Burton, Oliver Shepard and I managed to survive these post-expedition strains. Ollie and Charlie were loyal and honourable men. They nursed the odd grudge, as did I, but they kept these to themselves and we remained the most solid of friends as a result and despite constant rumours to the contrary. I can say the same for my good friend of twenty years, Mike Stroud.

  The Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the time, Dr John Heap, told me that he considered that Mike and I were ‘a marriage made in heaven, with your initiative and drive and Mike’s scientific ability’. After our return, Mike’s sister, Debbie, told a reporter: ‘When I heard that Mike nearly died through hypothermia, I didn’t know whether to run up to Ran and hug him for saving my brother or whether to shout at him for putting him in that danger in the first place.’ Mike told the press that we had got on ‘extraordinarily well’ together and, when asked if he would consider another expedition with me, replied: ‘I can think of nobody I would rather do these things with.’ My own responses had been on similar lines.

  Five peaceful months after our return from Antarctica, a tabloid reporter produced a full-page article which claimed to be based on Mike’s writings, which began: ‘The smiles and mutual backslapping that marked the return of Fiennes and Stroud from their record-breaking Antarctic expedition was a sham and their ninety-five day trek was peppered with bitter arguments.’

  Mike phoned me the day that the article appeared, apologised profusely and explained that he was furious with the newspaper which had completely misquoted him. He wrote back to the paper to say they had pub
lished ‘unadulterated rubbish’ and that he hoped to be able to go on another expedition with me before too long. For my part I had no intention of switching from Mike, should another expedition plan crop up.

  At this point however I had had enough of polar travels for the time being and found I could be happy and fulfilled just living at home with Ginny and her ever-increasing Aberdeen Angus herd, by that time over a hundred head of cattle. Each animal had a name and Ginny would often ask me to go and check on Gravity or Umberto or Bakhaita or whoever in one of the fields. The farm was situated at 1,300 feet above sea-level in the heart of the Exmoor National Park and attracted fog off the surrounding moors a good deal of the time. Locating a particular cow or bull was never easy, since to me they were all black, furry and identical. Only by their yellow ear tags could I initially identify any individual, although by 1995, after two whole expedition-free and domesticated years on the farm, I had become personally acquainted with the looks and foibles of at least two dozen of the Angus and a good handful of Ginny’s Black Welsh Mountain sheep.

  There were also her birds, about 200 at the time, ranging free in a fenced-off field with two ponds. Quail, guinea fowl, ornamental ducks, geese and egg-laying bantams rootled, swam and squawked alongside coots, pheasants, mallards and Canada geese. Iridescent Cayuga ducks were Ginny’s favourites. In the summer of 1994 Ginny entered her best looking cows at a number of West Country shows and won a great many awards. My job was to lead her bulls around the rings, wearing an NHS doctor’s white coat, tweed cap and Aberdeen Angus Society tie. Ollie Shepard was often at the same shows manning the mobile stall of the country clothing outfitters for whom he was working. That year Ginny and I also went to the Chelsea Flower Show, not to check out the exhibits, but to take the mickey out of Charlie Burton who was the head security officer controlling traffic and entry gates in a peaked cap and lapelled police-type jacket. The four of us met up on Exmoor or in London from time to time to yarn or to plan new projects that never left the drawing board.