by Michael Gill
Fuchs would be using motorised transport in the form of Sno-Cats. These would travel well on the plateau but might have difficulty ascending crevassed glaciers from the Weddell Sea to the plateau, and on the other side descending from the plateau by way of a glacier to the Ross Ice Shelf. This is where Ed and a New Zealand expedition came in. Fuchs wanted New Zealand to build a base (later called Scott Base) in McMurdo Sound adjoining the Ross Ice Shelf. From here dog teams and small aircraft would explore the mountains and find the glacier best suited for the descent of the Sno-Cats. At their furthest point, about halfway between McMurdo and the Pole, the New Zealand party would use ski-equipped planes to stock a depot with fuel and other supplies for the Fuchs party en route to Scott Base. The advantage in having Sir Edmund Hillary join the Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE) was that his fame and presence might encourage New Zealand to make a large contribution to expedition funding. Fuchs was largely unknown, but Hillary was arguably the most famous adventurer on the planet.
Fuchs was born in 1908, the son of a German father, Ernst Fuchs, and an English mother, Violet Watson.12 His English grandfather on his mother’s side, Charles Watson, had emigrated to Australia as a young man, and eventually became wealthy as a partner in a wholesale importing business. Following a second marriage at age 43 and the birth of Violet, Charles returned to England, gentrified by his affluence. Violet’s marriageability was diminished through being partially crippled by a childhood accident, but at age 32, while travelling in Europe with her mother, she met and fell in love with a young German in the hotel trade. His name was Ernst Fuchs, he was 24 years old, and he and Violet resolved to marry despite opposition from both families. Ernst had no obvious way of earning a living in England but Violet’s well-off cousins came to the rescue with enough money for the couple to establish a country home on seven acres of land in Kent.
The future looked settled, but in August 1914 their two countries were at war. Ernst was now an enemy alien, and so, through her marriage, was Violet. Their money and property were confiscated, and Ernst was interned, at first for a few months, then, following the sinking of the Lusitania with the drowning of 1500 civilians, for the duration of the war.
In the event, there was a happy ending. When wealthy grandfather Watson died, half his considerable estate went to Violet, and in 1927 the government released all property that had been confiscated in the war. The family bought a country house on 33 acres in Surrey. Vivian enjoyed the better sort of education via prep school, public school, and Cambridge where he studied natural sciences. The nickname ‘Bunny’ was acquired at school after Fuchs had learnt to walk on his hands, holding himself in balance by his legs hanging below his head like a rabbit’s ears. A tutor at Cambridge was Scottish geologist James Wordie, who had been with Shackleton’s famous 1914–17 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Wordie was leading almost annual expeditions into the Arctic, and it was on one of these, in 1929, that 21-year-old Fuchs fell in love with the remoteness and beauty of the polar region. In his diary he wrote, ‘I keep on feeling how impossible it is to realise my luck in being here to revel in and marvel at all these things’13 – an epiphany of the sort so often described by climbers on a particular first encounter with a mountain. Over the next three decades, Wordie would become an inspiration and mentor.
During the 1930s, Fuchs gained his PhD from Cambridge and went on geological expeditions to Africa. He was also there during the early years of the Second World War. He began his long association with the Antarctic when he was appointed Field Commander to the seven shore stations of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) in 1947. The Dependency claimed by Britain included South Georgia, the Falkland Islands, and the Antarctic Peninsula, the finger of mountains and ice which is an extension of the South American Andes and contains the Weddell Sea to the east. Because most of this area was also claimed by Argentina and Chile, an important function of FIDS was ‘effective occupation’ of shore stations. Here on the Antarctic Peninsula Fuchs learned about pack ice, about Antarctic travel using dogs, and acquired the toughness and stoicism that can make the harsh southern environment so fascinating for a select few.
It was here too in 1949 that he first dreamt of taking up where Shackleton had left off by making a crossing of Antarctica. James Wordie warned him that the times in 1949 were not propitious for a venture of such magnitude but after the excitement of Everest in 1953, Fuchs began cautiously sounding out potential supporters.
The committees in London and New Zealand
Like the expeditions of Scott and Shackleton, Fuchs’s TAE was privately conceived and was structured as a limited liability company. Its budget would depend on what could be raised from governments, companies and the public. At a meeting of the Polar Advisory Committee in September 1953, reasons for supporting the TAE were listed:14
Prestige of nations involved
Romantic appeal
Justify territorial claims to Coats Land [eastern shore of the Weddell Sea] and the Ross Dependency
Knowledge of meteorological conditions at the South Pole
Knowledge regarding air routes potential
Knowledge of the Antarctic ice sheet and biology
Training for service personnel.
Fuchs liked to frame his expedition as a scientific endeavour but he was aware of the other advantages.
The TAE made slow progress through 1954 but began suddenly to take shape in 1955 with the formation of a UK Committee of Management under the chairmanship of Marshall of the Royal Air Force, Sir John Slessor. As members he had five other Knights of the Realm, a general, a senior partner in a London law firm, a banker, the Bishop of Norwich, and finally a New Zealand representative, Charles Bowden. Funding was a problem but in February 1955 Sir Winston Churchill made a start by announcing a government grant of £100,000. More would follow, including the very expensive funding of all fuels by British Petroleum.
To begin with the New Zealand government showed little interest in funding the TAE or the scientific activities of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), but pressure began to build when they were reminded that they were responsible for the administration of the Ross Sea Dependency. No one owns any part of Antarctica, but claims had been lodged for various ‘sectors’, triangles with the South Pole at their vertex. The Ross Sea Dependency sector, which includes the Ross Ice Shelf, McMurdo Sound and Ross Island, had been claimed by the British in 1923 but placed under the Governor-General of New Zealand, the British Dominion closest to the Ross Sea. It was on the shingle beaches of Ross Island that Scott and Shackleton had built huts during the three expeditions of 1902, 1908 and 1911, and it was here that the Americans had already begun building the largest of their seven IGY bases on the continent. The advantages of Ross Island were its access to open sea for cargo ships in summer, and a runway on sea ice for cargo planes from Christchurch during spring and most of the summer. For Pole-bound parties it had access to the Ross Ice Shelf all year round.
In May 1955 the New Zealand government began its commitment by making a grant of £50,000 to the TAE. In Wellington a Ross Sea Committee (RSC) was established to manage New Zealand’s expanding Antarctic activities and liaise with Sir John Slessor’s TAE committee in London. An early task was to appoint a leader of what was being described as the New Zealand Antarctic Expedition. On 9 June 1955, while Hillary was on a lecture tour in South Africa, he received the invitation:
committee offer you leadership ross sea expedition with assurance will appoint deputy leader of administrative ability and on understanding that while serving primary function of laying depots and bringing home crossing party you must pay due regard to scientific aspects of expedition also leader must be subject to direction fuchs and committee please reply = helm.15
The invitation was expected and Ed cabled his acceptance immediately. The boundaries of a line such as ‘LEADER MUST BE SUBJECT TO DIRECTION FUCHS AND COMMITTEE’ would need to be tested, but for now all parties were in the honeymoon phase of thei
r relationship. The secretary of the RSC was Arthur Helm, a knowledgeable enthusiast from the New Zealand Antarctic Society which had been unsuccessfully promoting the cause of Antarctic research for many years. The chairman, Charles Bowden, was a political appointee, an MP and Cabinet minister. Now approaching 70, he felt honoured to fill this uncontentious position which might lead in a couple of years to a well-earned knighthood. Sadly for him, it never worked this way. ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent mountaineer?’ was a thought that could have crossed his mind from to time.
The leader’s mission in the Antarctic
Although the first task was to build Scott Base to house the TAE support team, this was a big investment for an uncomplicated task of limited duration. They would have dog teams, planes, explorers, surveyors, scientists – surely they could also explore and map the untouched mountain country in the adjacent Victoria Mountains and study its geology? It was soon agreed that five New Zealand scientists linked to the IGY would be added to Scott Base. On top of this, a new objective was developing in the fertile imagination of Edmund Hillary.
A month after his appointment as leader, Ed was at an IGY conference and writing to Arthur Helm, who shared Ed’s excitement about the possibilities awaiting them in Antarctica:
Dear Arthur, I went to the IGY Conference in Paris … The main surprise was the enormous extent of the planned activities … the biggest surprise to us was the announcement that the United States was putting a big base in McMurdo Sound … The Americans were very hearty and made numerous offers of assistance … Admiral Dufek will take 1000 tons of gear to McMurdo for us …
I had some useful discussion with Fuchs … subject to the limits of finance that although the objective for NZ must be the establishment of a dump on the Polar Plateau … the expedition should have sufficient supplies and equipment that they could travel out as far as the South Pole …
Fuchs seemed reasonably happy with these proposals …
The greatest weakness of our plan is the lack of tracked vehicles … as it might be possible to get vehicles onto the Polar Plateau …
Regards, Ed Hillary16
No one could say that Ed had not laid his cards on the table with both Fuchs and with the RSC from the beginning. If he was to build New Zealand’s Scott Base, and establish depots for Fuchs from the Polar Plateau down to the Ross Ice Shelf, he wanted the option, if time was available, to go to the Pole. He wanted tracked vehicles as well as dog teams for making the route to the Plateau and its depot. Later it would be said that he nursed his ambition to go to the Pole in secret, but the truth was that no one had listened to what he was saying or taken him seriously.
The committees in London and Wellington could have asked themselves what a restless, competitive Ed Hillary might aim for in Antarctica where he had no scientific interests. The thought could have crossed their minds that he might like to add a visit to the Pole to his curriculum vitae. But they could also see that his expedition would lack the necessary resources for such an endeavour. He was not an Amundsen with a lifetime’s expertise in dog-handling and cross-country skiing in high latitudes. He was not a Scott with the determination to man-haul even unto death. He was not a Fuchs with Sno-Cats that could bestride the continent. He was a mountaineer, and the South Pole had lodged itself in his brain as the next mountain he wanted to climb.
The IGY populates Antarctica
The Antarctic is for the most part empty, particularly in winter, but during the IGY of July 1957 to December 1958 and the support years of 1954–59, the continent was, relatively speaking, teeming with people occupying more than 40 bases from 12 countries. This was a remarkable collaboration of scientists studying such subjects as aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, ionospheric physics, solar activity, geomagnetism, glaciology, meteorology, rocketry and seismology. The importance of the composition of the atmosphere on the earth-level environment was being recognised, as was the importance of the polar ice cap which contains 70 per cent of Earth’s fresh water. Significant areas of ice cap had their base below sea level – and it was apparent that the continent had more inlets and adjacent islands than anyone had appreciated.
Rocketry had a link to the IGY, and the Soviet Union and the USA showed off their ability to launch Earth-orbiting satellites for the first time, the Soviets with Sputnik 1 in October 1957, and Sputnik 2 carrying the short-lived dog Laika a month later. In January 1958, the USA’s Explorer 1 was launched into orbit. For all countries taking part in the IGY, it was a chance to display their interest in the geopolitics of the most remote of the Earth’s continents. For its part, the USA was spending $250 million over five years, most of it on logistics and support provided by the US Navy but $5 million for the science.
Although the TAE was following in the footsteps of Shackleton and Scott, its safety margins were immeasurably wider. Radio networks kept field parties in daily contact with bases whose ski-equipped planes could mount a rescue mission or fly scientific parties into remote locations: with its vast expanses of snow and ice, the whole continent was an airfield. Flying could certainly be hazardous, particularly in whiteout conditions, and crevasse country needed to be treated with circumspection, but compared with the dangerous isolation in which Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen had operated, the Antarctic had become a relatively safe place.
– CHAPTER 19 –
Scott Base
Although Ed had met Fuchs several times, he could not claim to have even begun to know him until they shared a small ship’s cabin as they sailed south on the Theron from Montevideo to the Weddell Sea in December 1955. Ed, who had been invited along as an observer, would have preferred a cabin with one of the other three Kiwis on board – his old friend George Lowe, or his deputy leader Bob Miller, or chief pilot John Claydon – but Fuchs decreed otherwise. It was a first lesson: Bunny Fuchs didn’t discuss preferences, he made decisions.
George Lowe observed with fascination the differences between Bunny Fuchs and Ed Hillary. He noted, as did others, that Fuchs was not in the habit of sharing a problem or seeking advice from anyone. As he put it, ‘We did not sit around as a party discussing the pros and cons of a move. Pros and cons were announced by Bunny, who worked them out in camera.’1 He described how reading at meals throughout the winter became an accepted custom:
I think it was Bunny himself who started it, and eventually it was agreed to maintain a ‘quiet’ table for those who wanted to pore over books, and a ‘noisy’ table for those preferring to chatter. There was a suggestion of method in Bunny’s encouragement of the reading habit, for there was no doubt that he disapproved of any discussion touching on the expedition’s plans or progress. Indeed, the one spark that could be guaranteed to jerk Bunny away from his book was the start of a conversation, even a desultory chat, on some expedition topic such as vehicles and equipment.
One day a group of three or four were listening with interest while Geoff Pratt held forth on the subject of the gloves we wore. ‘These things are no bloody good,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting I could design a far more efficient glove for conditions like ours.’
Bunny glanced up sharply from his book, took off his glasses, laid them on the open pages and spoke. ‘When you know a good deal more about Antarctic conditions,’ he said quietly, ‘you’ll know more about gloves. Those gloves have been designed after years of experience – and I think you’ll find they do the job they’re intended for.’
Bunny replaced his glasses, picked up the book and went on reading. After his intervention the glove topic, like many another, was dropped.2
Ed would have been of the party who liked to yarn rather than read, and on Theron he was soon finding Fuchs a chilly companion. Ed’s opinions were not of interest to Fuchs who had spent years of travel with dogs along the ice-bound shores of the Antarctic Peninsula. As Fuchs tartly pointed out, Hillary ‘at that time had never even seen sea ice’.3
There might not have been a lot of talk in the top cabin, but Ed was to learn a great deal d
uring his more than two months aboard Theron. There was an almost terminal setback at the outset when the ship was beset in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea between 24 December and 20 January. Not many ships had entered the south Weddell Sea, but the consensus, such as it was, had been to keep east until open water to the south gave passage to Cape Norwegia on the Antarctic continent. From here the prevailing easterly winds would briefly open a providential lead of hundreds of miles of open water skirting the ice cliffs of the continent.
Fuchs had studied the oceanography of the Weddell Sea and, according to rumour, believed that the elusive central route used by Weddell in 1823 was the key to a fast passage to the ice shelf where he would build his base. In his accounts Fuchs avoids giving reasons for his decision to enter the ice at a point less easterly than other vessels that year.4 He made an enigmatic journal entry on 23 December: ‘purposely entered the ice as far west as 30°W to allow diversion to the east’.5 Whatever the reason, the reality was that soon they were being slowed by thick sea ice. To compound their frustration, radio contact with the Royal Society’s IGY vessel Tottan showed she was making fast progress out east. There was additional annoyance for Ed. When expedition meetings were held when Theron was immobilised in the pack ice, Ed was not invited to them. ‘I don’t think Bunny had any concept of how irritating I found this – after all I was the leader of the other half of his expedition.’6