Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  Dear Bunny, I am very concerned about the serious delay in your plans. It is about 1,250 miles from the Pole to Scott Base, much of the travelling from D700 north being somewhat slow and laborious with rough, hard sastrugi. Leaving the Pole late in January you will head into increasing bad weather and winter temperatures plus vehicles that are showing signs of strain. Both of my mechanics regard such a late journey as an unjustifiable risk and are not prepared to wait and travel with your party. I agree with this view and think you should seriously consider splitting your journey over two years. You still probably have a major journey in front of you to reach the Pole. Why not winter your vehicles at the Pole, fly out to Scott Base with American aircraft, return to civilisation for the winter and then fly back in to the Pole Station next November and complete your journey. This plan would enable you to do a far more satisfactory job of your seismic work and I feel fairly confident that Admiral Dufek would assist …38

  There were many reasons why Ed should not be handing out this sort of advice. For a start, he’d have known better than anyone that Fuchs could pick up speed once he’d joined the route established to Scott Base. The tracks would lead them around or through the crevassed areas, and Ed knew in detail which slopes to descend through the snakes and ladders of the Skelton Glacier. The Sno-Cats with their four broad pontoon feet could handle soft snow better than the tractors and could bridge crevasses more easily. The dog teams, which had been a limiting factor, were to be flown out to Scott Base by the Americans. Seismic shots would become less frequent. Removal of these limitations meant that on a trouble-free day the vehicles could cover 60 miles.

  More important than this increase in speed was the personality of Bunny Fuchs. He was not a person who gave up, yet here was his deputy – someone who had just upstaged him with his dash to the Pole – advising just that. British bulldogs do not give up. There could be only one response to Ed’s suggestion, and two days later, while still more than 300 miles from the Pole, Fuchs delivered it:

  Appreciate your concern but there can be no question of abandoning journey at this stage … I understand your mechanics’ reluctance to undertake further travel, and in view of your opinion that late season travel is an unjustifiable risk I do not feel able to ask you to join us at D700 in spite of your valuable local knowledge. We will therefore have to wend our way using the traverse you leave at the Pole … Bunny Fuchs39

  If you’re in a hole, stop digging, but Ed now compounded his error by sending a long cable to Sir John Slessor, finishing with the advice:

  To my mind enough prestige will have been gained by the arrival of Fuchs and ourselves at the South Pole to enable a modification of the plan to allow the task to be carried out in a reasonable and safe manner over a two year period whereas a forced march late in the season could well cause most unfavourable publicity. Your instructions are the only things that can enable Fuchs to save face and adopt a modified plan so I would earnestly request that the Management Committee should give this matter its earliest consideration. Hillary40

  Up to now, the exchange of messages between Hillary and Fuchs had, in theory at least, been private, but confidentiality was always fragile. The final, unfortunate act in the saga took place in the Wellington post office through which was passing Ed’s private recommendation to the London committee. The clerk handling cables from the Antarctic had noted as a general rule of thumb that a long cable was a press release while the shorter communications were for the committees. The cable to Slessor and Bowden was long – so was delivered into the incredulous but grateful hands of a waiting press. Slessor and Bowden read the contents of their private cables as banner headlines in the London and Wellington dailies. As Arthur Helm said to Ed in the course of an explanation and apology, ‘From there on the whole thing blew up.’41 The message went viral.

  Why was it that Ed Hillary made such a bungle? There could be no excuses, but at least there might be an explanation. Ed had lost his respect for Fuchs. He disliked Fuchs’s assumption of superiority despite the imperfections of some of his decisions. He disliked his reluctance to communicate and his lack of empathy with other people. He was seriously worried that Fuchs was travelling so slowly that the whole expedition would miss the boat which was due to depart for New Zealand in March. Fuchs was averaging 20 miles a day on the Plateau from South Ice to the Pole, and at that rate he wouldn’t reach Scott Base until the end of March, the date when Scott had died of starvation and cold. This wasn’t going to happen to the TAE, but if the last transport departed before they arrived at Scott Base, Ed faced the unappealing prospect of spending the winter and spring of 1958 in the close company of Bunny Fuchs.

  Who did Ed turn to for advice on his dash to the Pole? If Louise had been available for consultation, she would have recognised the folly of advising Fuchs to give up. But instead of Louise he had Peter Mulgrew as his companion in the caboose, the 12-by-4-foot caravan on skis which housed the radio and their bunks. The other three had their own tents, heated by a primus stove, and they cooked their meals separately. The isolation of living and travelling in the colder corners of the Antarctic can bring people close to each other but can also feed paranoia. One can imagine Hillary and Mulgrew entering a folie à deux as they read and wrote their radio messages and expressed their exasperations as to what Fuchs was doing or not doing. Combine this with hubris and it was a dangerous brew.

  There was an unaccustomedly rueful note in the letters Ed wrote to Louise:

  8 January 1958

  Well, darling, I’m rather glad we did get to the Pole even if it does appear to have provoked a bit of a storm. It was most unfortunate that they released to the Press my private note about Bunny pulling out at the Pole – it certainly stirred up a lot of comment … I think Bunny’s pride has been so hurt that he’ll be keen to cross whatever happens. I’ve received a swag of telegrams just like the old Everest days … and an enthusiastic cable from Hodders wanting to sign me up for my personal book on the same terms as High Adventure which was pretty useful financially …

  In the last week I had a lot of worry as to whether our fuel was going to hold out and also the small nagging voice wondering if I was going to find the place. Well, as usual, everything turned out perfectly and we arrived without difficulty on our last drum of fuel. My navigation has been most encouraging. However it has all been a time of high tension and I’d driven everyone pretty hard and we hadn’t had much sleep so we were very pleased to arrive. I can quite honestly say I haven’t got the dash for this sort of thing anymore. I certainly still can push things pretty fiercely but it takes more out of me and I don’t get the same satisfaction out of it. Also … I have to make myself do things involving much risk …

  15 January

  My dearest Louise, In a way it’s a slightly trying time at the moment … As you no doubt realise, I’m fed up to the gills with Bunny … I’ve been hearing all the gossip … Bunny is being most secretive about his activities and progress and we find it extremely difficult to prise even the smallest amount of information out of him … When I examine the position objectively I must admit I feel quite confident that Bunny will get to McMurdo OK … The newspaper controversy was a bit sickening … my main interest now is to get away from it all…’42

  Fuchs and his Sno-Cats, flags flying bravely, arrived in triumph at the Pole on 19 January 1958. Ed flew in from Scott Base to display as warm a welcome as he could muster before returning to the base. By 7 February, averaging 37 miles per day, the same speed as the tractors, the Sno-Cats had reached D700, where they were joined by Ed, flown in to be Fuchs’s guide down the Skelton. They reached Scott Base on 2 March. Within an hour of arrival, Bunny Fuchs had become Sir Vivian. He announced in a self-deprecating way that he had taken 99 days rather than the 100 days he had predicted – a claim to accuracy that avoided discussion on how far astray his early projections had been. Nevertheless, the limelight shone on Bunny Fuchs, leaving Hillary in the background, a position he had not been used to after E
verest.

  Ed never admitted in his autobiographies that he had made mistakes in his dealings with Fuchs, but their incompatibility was made clear. Travelling with Dufek he wrote, ‘I boarded a plane with George Dufek and flew back to Scott Base. Why was it, I wondered that I always felt slightly uncomfortable with Bunny and yet completely relaxed with Admiral George Dufek?’43 Over the years one never heard Ed talk much about his dash to the Pole. It became part of his mythology, taking farm tractors across the ice, but there were some sore spots there that were best left alone.

  – CHAPTER 21 –

  Beekeeper in search of a better-paying occupation

  Since Everest and through the Antarctic, Ed had been kept busy, but by 1958 he was looking at a future with not much to support a wife and two small children. A year or two back there had been talk of joining Bunny Fuchs on a lecture tour, but this now had little appeal for either party. Ed was named co-author of the expedition book, The Crossing of Antarctica, but as the Author’s Acknowledgements not too obliquely indicate, the main author was V.E.F. Ed’s account of the establishment of four depots and the trip to the Pole was tucked into a chapter entitled ‘Spring and Summer Journeys from Scott Base’.

  Rear-Admiral Cecil R.L. Parry wrote on 7 October 1958 that the Finance Committee of the TAE had met to discuss honorariums for the book and ‘it was decided to give you £250 for your contribution’.1 It was a small reward for the startling publicity generated by Ed’s dash to the Pole and his subsequent self-harming free advice to Fuchs. Fuchs himself wrote with clarity and precision, and the book sold 130,000 copies in hardcover alone.2 But anyone interested in the clash of personalities, or personalities at all, would have been disappointed.

  Ever since Everest, Ed had been reassured that money would never again be a problem. Don’t worry, he was frequently told, ‘you’ll get lots of directorships and good government jobs. They’re sure to make you an ambassador or something! … Mostly I was approached by people who sold cigarettes or hair cream and thought my title would look good in one of their advertisements even if I didn’t use their products. I was in considerable demand for luncheon talks and as a guest of honour at country balls …’3 With a population of just over two million, many of them in the farming sector, New Zealand in the 1950s and ’60s offered lean pickings for its few celebrities. Business consisted largely of import licences which gave the owner a steady stream of income from a monopoly whose maintenance required little work. There were few company boards looking for enterprising directors, and Ed saw himself as left-wing anyway. The Great Depression of the 1930s was the background to his formative teenage years. His pacifist, anti-imperial father was a powerful influence: ‘I admired his moral courage – he would battle fiercely against society or the powers-that-be on a matter of principle.’4 And even in the more prosperous decades of the 1990s and 2000s, Ed was never interested in acquiring wealth beyond the ordinary comforts of a New Zealand middle-class family.

  What about a diplomatic post? Ed had probably disqualified himself from a job requiring diplomacy. Officialdom, whether in Wellington or London, was unforgiving. As Douglas McKenzie wrote in 1963: ‘… the effect of official disapprobation was pervasive … Edmund Hillary had embarrassed the Ross Sea Committee … and he had embarrassed the government – than whom there is no body in New Zealand more easily chilled by United Kingdom disapproval.’5

  Ed shared his restlessness with George Lowe, who had decided to live in England rather than return to New Zealand – but doing what?

  ‘11/8/58. Dear George, Your life seems to have dropped back into the old routine without much indication of substantial progress … What has happened to all those movie cameraman possibilities? The lecturing life produces a comfortable income but it doesn’t seem to have a helluva lot of future … Mind you I can’t talk as I’m still somewhat at a loose end. All the rosy ideas that were floating about on my return from McMurdo about worthwhile Public jobs have effectively disappeared making it obvious that nothing will be handed out on a platter. So for the next year or two I’ll be combining the writing of my personal book with part-time bee-keeping …6

  George was in the middle of writing his own personal account, but books could not be published within three years of 1 March 1958 without permission from the London committee of the TAE. Lowe was granted permission, but Ed had to wait until 1961. George’s preferred title for his book, published in 1959, was the elegant No Latitude for Error, but his English publishers favoured Because It Is There. But No Latitude for Error was too good a title to waste, and Ed gladly used it himself. In his Foreword he wrote:

  This is an account of my personal participation in Antarctic exploration from my first meeting with Sir Vivian Fuchs in 1953 until the conclusion of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1958 – by which time my party had completed the first tractor trip to the South Pole and Fuchs the first crossing of the Antarctic Continent.

  It does not seek to follow the pattern of an ‘Official Account’ which, by custom, eschews all personal problems and conflicts and details only the inexorable progress of the expedition, step by step and according to plan, until the grand but inevitable conclusion is reached. Instead I have sought to recreate the whole adventure as I lived it at the time – my pleasures or disappointments, successes or failures.

  Much of my story covers the activities of the first New Zealand Antarctic Expedition, which though an integral part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition yet had very much an entity of its own – and an irrepressible enthusiasm which resulted in widespread exploration and scientific activity. Success in an expedition is only achieved through a combined effort, and for this I must thank the members of my New Zealand party; for my mistakes I have only myself to blame.

  Ed’s request to publish earlier than 1961 was considered by the London committee, which made its acceptance dependent on payment of 10 per cent of royalties to the TAE and manuscript approval by Fuchs – which was not forthcoming. Fuchs ‘found the tone of the book distasteful’.7

  A handful of reviews in Ed’s files show some New Zealand reactions to the book after it was published in 1961. The Auckland Star reviewer wrote:

  It is unfortunate that the controversy that has arisen over the author’s relations with the Ross Sea Committee over his dash to the Pole has put the viewing of this book out of focus. Basically it is a story of thrilling adventure, of hazardous deeds, of privations and the dogged overcoming of difficulties. And it is the best book written on Antarctic exploration. Sir Edmund’s powers of authorship have increased and through the story one sees the steady development of his qualities of leadership …8

  The Wairarapa Times gave a variant of the title: No Room for Latitude.9 E.R.S., in Zealandia, asked:

  What was the point of making a trip to the South Pole by tractor and dog-team when it could so easily be reached by air?

  For Sir Edmund it was just another adventure with no more purpose than playing a Rugby match. The game was the thing: the geophysical objects and the detailed examination of the southern land mass were secondary … The planners fell into two categories, the scientists and the publicists … The publicists wanted a story of endurance with Fuchs as its hero – whereas Hillary felt that whoever won the race to the South Pole was the hero … The humorous angle, that planes were flying to and from the Pole almost every day, seems to have escaped both Hillary and the publicists. It was a fine feat of endurance but about as much an exploring trip as walking cross-country from Hamilton to Te Kuiti.

  What sort of man is Edmund Hillary? To judge by his own account, an old-fashioned blood-boots-and-sweat explorer, whose tragedy it is to be born a hundred years too late. Machines do much more efficiently what was done laboriously by the pioneers of yesteryear. So Hillary and his like are reduced to climbing mountain peaks and making expeditions which serve, in the main, no very great purpose.

  Hillary is also quite obviously a leader of men, the kind of person who can get things done by rule of thumb whe
n more complicated methods only add to the confusion.

  The controversy? The truth is that Hillary was on time while Fuchs was late. The people who wrote the script had Fuchs as hero but if they wanted to keep the story straight, they wouldn’t have put Hillary in a minor part – he was too big to fit it.

  Admiral Dufek could have been forgiven if he had greeted Hillary and Fuchs at the Pole with the war-time slogan: ‘Was your journey really necessary?’ It says something for his urbanity and kindness that he did not, but treated them instead with the kindness and helpfulness of a big brother helping the children with their games.10

  When Ed was not writing his book or encouraging Rex to look after the bees, he was landscaping the steep slope on which he had built the family’s new house, described by a visiting French journalist as très bijou. The property below the house was an old orchard, and in the winter of 1958 Ed dug paths, planted grass and created narrow garden beds where flowers, mint and parsley could be grown. As he worked on his book in his study he could watch winter squalls of rain change quickly to theatrically brilliant light on a distant sea varying from grey, through green, to bright azure.

  In July Ed had tried to assuage the old restlessness with an attempt on an unclimbed ridge on Scott’s Knob in the Kaikōuras, an area for which he retained a perverse affection from his Air Force days. Accompanying him were the ever-loyal Rex, Antarctic accomplice Peter Mulgrew, and Louise who was three months pregnant with Belinda. Leaving the road late one afternoon, and carrying heavy loads, they set off up a gorge where there was ice on every pool and on the fringes of the river. Ed and Peter shot two pigs which they roasted over a camp fire. Four days later, leaving Louise behind in the tent, they made their attempt on Scott’s Knob up an icy unstable ridge, watched by nearby wild thar and chamois. But the ridge was too long and the winter daylight too short, so they abandoned the climb and returned to the waiting Louise who might have been reflecting that this would have been an inhospitable place to have a miscarriage. In his diary next day Ed wrote, ‘Have decided that Kaikouras too tough for Louise and she will go to Christchurch.’11 We do not have Louise’s account of this or similar trips.