So Wally went along with the Committee’s preference for Ken Hedges who, but for his complete lack of polar experience, seemed a tough and pleasant personality. They first met in a London pub. Wally remembers how he spent the entire interview trying to describe to Ken just what polar travel and living was like and, as a result, he hardly asked Ken anything at all, discovering very little about his background and interests.
There was little enough time to balance out the question of team composition anyway. With so many things to do and Wally scurrying between his parents’ home in Warwickshire and his office in London, it was still very much a one-man band. Ken Hedges and Allan Gill were due to fly out by RAF Hercules transport plane with the bulk of the gear, first to Thule to collect the dogs, and then on to Point Barrow at the end of December. Wally was going to fly out direct to meet them there in early January 1968. Anna Koerner’s baby was due towards the end of January and Fritz was determined to be with her at the birth and make sure everything was all right before leaving her for sixteen months. This didn’t suit the Committee and Fritz and Anna were brought over to London to discuss the problem. Fritz remembers the incident vividly.
‘The Committee said: “You must leave on the dot.” We went on to discuss this and the discussion got down to the birth being induced. I can remember the exact words Old Smiler (that’s what we called Sir Miles Clifford) said: “I think it’s a good idea. You don’t mind having the child induced, do you, Anna?” Anna was just looking at them, amazed, and they were all sitting there, puffing on their pipes.’
Wally flew out of England on 10 January and joined his party at Point Barrow a few days later. Point Barrow is like so many Arctic stations, a collection of huts and hangars jutting out of the empty, snow-covered tundra. Their 70,000 pounds of supplies, sledges, tents, food for men and dogs, were stored in a big warehouse. Ken Hedges had certainly been plunged in at the deep end, having already driven a dog team seventy miles in the pitch dark and cold of mid-winter from Qanaq to the US Air Force Base at Thule. It was the first time he had ever handled dogs or been exposed to such extreme cold. The next weeks were spent in frantic preparation. Dog harnesses were adjusted and restitched by the Eskimo women, sledges and tents were checked, radios tested. The supplies which were going to be air-dropped by the Canadian Air Force had to be sorted out. They made short journeys over the ice to try out the gear and train the dog teams and all the time, out there to the north, was the vast stretch of ice covering the Arctic Ocean – implacable, huge, menacing. They were not yet a complete team, but Fritz Koerner’s daughter arrived, by natural birth, on 31 January; Fritz was at Point Barrow by 8 February and, at last, they were ready to set out.
The overall plan was to put in as much sledging progress across the polar pack ice before the summer melt made travel impossible. Then for two months they would camp on a suitably substantial floe which would itself continue creeping on towards the Pole in the circular polar drift. In the autumn they would sledge on again until the four months of winter darkness obliged them to set up camp once more; then with the spring would come the last frantic dash for Spitsbergen before the ice broke up beneath them.
The first and perhaps most difficult problem of the entire journey was to find a way of crossing the eighty-mile belt of fractured young ice between the Point Barrow coast and the relative solidity of the polar pack ice. This was a region of shifting currents, where the great ice floes were ground together against the immovable land mass, an area of piled up, ever moving pressure ridges, of changing leads of open water. Day after day Wally flew over it in a Cessna 180, but what he saw was never encouraging. There was no sign of the ice compressing to form the vital bridge they needed and, as the days slipped by the tension increased. Back in London the media printed stories of gloom and doom, while the worries of the Committee could almost be felt over the radio waves.
At last, on 22 February, the ice bridge to the polar pack seemed at least feasible, and the four set out with their dog teams and sledges, along the coastline and then out on to the piled rubble of ice that marked the edge of the Arctic Ocean. For the next eighteen months they would be travelling across the constantly shifting ice, which would rarely be more than six or seven feet thick and which could split beneath them at any moment. The dash for the relatively stable pack ice foundered into a laborious crawl almost immediately, their way barred by the first pressure ridge, a twenty-foot-high wall of ice blocks. They scrambled up to get a wider view. What they saw was discouraging.
‘As far as the eye could see there was chaos – no way seemed possible except the route by which we had come. It was like a city razed to the ground by a blitz or an act of God, an alabaster city so smashed that no landmarks remained. It was a desolate scene, purified by a covering of snow that had been packed down by the wind; dazzling bright yet horrifying.’
The only way to get through was to cut down the walls of ice, using the debris to build ramps for the sledges to be heaved or pushed across and down into the rut beyond. It was –41 °C, but their clothes were soon damp with sweat, a dampness that would turn into a bitter chill as soon as they stopped their exertion. And then, once they had forced the first ridge, there was another, another and yet another. There was mush ice, which was just particles jumbled together, barely fused by the pressure of the floes on either side, only a few inches thick, a quaking bog with thousands of feet of black, sub-zero waters beneath. They skeetered across these sections, the dogs scrambling, yapping frantically, the men shuffling, striding, fearful of the easily imagined horrors of immersion in the waters below. There was little rest at night with the constant groaning of the ice and the fear of it splitting beneath the tents. And there was the even greater fear of disgrace and ridicule. What if they couldn’t break through to the pack ice beyond? They would have to return to face the waiting media, the sceptics who said they had no chance anyway. They were all frightened, but the fear of failure and of ridicule was greater than that of death. It was the same feeling that Heyerdahl had had as Kon-Tiki limped painfully from the coast of Peru.
Doggedly they fought their way from floe to floe, edging northwards whenever possible, though they were also at the mercy of the winds and currents which were sweeping the ice they were crossing steadily towards open waters. After sixteen days of struggle, they were only seventeen miles from Point Barrow. At this stage they were travelling light, carrying only a few days’ food and relying on being resupplied by the Cessna, whose pilot also tried to advise them on the terrain lying ahead. For most of the time his information was discouraging. They were now 400 miles behind schedule. This was serious, since they needed to be in the right place by the height of summer to find a suitably large ice floe on which to drift through the summer months towards the Pole. If they were forced to stop short of their planned destination, they would be in the wrong region of drift and could be swept away to one side of the Pole. Wally, therefore, resolved to keep sledging well into the summer, even though this would mean more problems with open leads between the ice floes. He had anticipated this and had designed the sledges so that they could be turned into boats for crossing short stretches of open water.
By 20 March they had at last broken through the coastal fracture zone and were on the permanent polar pack ice. There were still pressure ridges to cross, open leads to negotiate, but their progress was now very much faster. They were making sixteen or seventeen miles in a day. But they were now increasingly confronted with another problem. There were seams within the fragile unity of the group, the beginnings of a division into three and one, and Ken Hedges was becoming the odd man out. Wally wrote:
‘Kens problems were social; physically he was in good shape, professionally he was admired and encouraged by his regiment for joining the expedition, but it was inevitable that the difference in training and temperament would set him apart from the three of us.
‘Ken was a good officer, a Christian and a gentleman. We were three seasoned polar men. The many years we had live
d in isolated polar camps had left their mark on us; we would no doubt be regarded by a genteel society as rough, crude, self-reliant and irreligious. We were obsessed by and in love with the polar setting and the hard physical challenge of polar exploration. We were old friends; Allan and I had made a tough journey together the previous year; Allan and Fritz had made others; the three of us had gone through the same basic polar training at the same Antarctic base – Hope Bay. There was a close bond between us, a mutual trust and respect; we spoke the same language. Only a man with precisely the same background would have fitted instantly into such a society; it was therefore no surprise to us that Ken had felt alien at the start of the journey; but it had been worrying us for some time that he did not appear to be slipping naturally into our way of life.’
In any enclosed community little idiosyncrasies can become a savage irritant, and the way a person scratches his nose, stresses certain syllables or gulps his tea can become a quite irrational focus to externalise much deeper and more serious differences. The most obvious difference between Ken and the others was more than a mere mannerism. It was his religious belief, but this seems to have focused all the other differences of experience and background into something that was easily definable, and indeed mentioned to me by each of the others. Ken was a devout Baptist, the other three either atheist or agnostic. They found Ken difficult to live with. Little things would grate, like the way he would often go off to pray or meditate on top of a nearby pressure ridge – ’humbling’ the others called it, because of the characteristic stance he adopted, or the meek yet impenetrable front which they felt he put up between them in all arguments. It was a rift which was only to get wider as the months passed, driving Ken even further in on himself. Wally writes: ‘Ken, by his own admission, was unhappy in our society because he felt we were not “bringing him in”, and there was little we could do to improve the situation, for as far as we were concerned we had tried to interest him in our way of life and evidently failed.’
Their daily routine did nothing to alleviate Ken’s feeling of isolation. For a start, they each had their own dog team and through the day travelled separately, often hundreds of yards apart. The only time they came together was at an obstacle and, even here, Ken must have been forced anew to face the difference between himself and the others as the three polar experts pooled their knowledge and experience to manoeuvre a sledge over a pressure ridge or across an open lead. It was inevitable that Ken remained an onlooker, however willing he may have been to take an active part.
When I went to see him, he did not want to talk about the differences that occurred between himself and the other three; he did observe, however:
‘We didn’t meet as a team until a week before we set out and so there was no fellowship in that team. There was among the other three because they had all sledged together, but, as a team, in which twenty-five per cent was new, meaning myself, there was not that sense of fellowship. I didn’t have this sense of friendship, facing the fifty-fifty chance of dying, which is how I rated our chances. I was carried along by several conceptions; one was of acquitting myself as honourably as circumstances permitted, coming from the SAS and being a commissioned officer; also, there was this vague sense of British history, particularly in its polar sense. There was an absolute dedication and I put my life on the line on this one. I would endeavour to commit myself with honour, come what may and just hope that I wouldn’t have to pay the full price. There was a sense of resignation about it all.’
It was also very frightening; Wally Herbert described it for me:
‘We were all shit scared in our own desperate sort of ways to come through this period and each of the four men had their own way of handling this situation. We’d been in the Antarctic and Arctic in many dangerous situations; we’d experienced the dark before, but to Ken it was new and he was cold, he was uncomfortable; he was afraid as we all were, but for him it was new and so presumably for him it was very much more frightening.’
And there was also the dog team. This was what Ken found the most difficult. Much of polar living and travel is simple, basic survival, of getting used to putting up a tent in a blizzard, of struggling with a Primus stove, of plodding over mile upon mile of featureless ice, but managing a dog team is a real skill and one that needs years of experience to master fully. The other three had all driven dog teams in the Antarctic and the previous year Wally and Allan had gained further experience, but Ken had to learn from scratch. Essentially a kind man, he found it difficult to discipline his team in the way to which they were accustomed. He told me:
‘I wasn’t driving my dogs; I was walking out in front of them, whistling to the silly creatures to follow me, which they did. I remember Fritz saying to me, “Come on, Ken, you know you can’t walk across the Arctic like this. You’ll have to learn sooner or later to drive from behind rather than lead from the front.” Eventually I did, though I don’t rate myself a masterful sledge driver by any manner of means.’
As spring crept into summer, with its eternal, glaring daylight, the going became harder, with more and more open leads to find their way through. Everything was wet with snow – a watery quagmire, the ice increasingly mushy, their sleeping bags perpetually damp, their rucksacks soaked through, the tents a soggy mess. There was the growing worry of whether they could find a sufficiently large and solid floe on which to drift through the summer into the following autumn when, once again, they would be able to resume their progress. They had sledged 1,180 miles over the polar pack ice – further from land than any other polar traveller; at the same time they had managed to carry out some scientific work. Each day Fritz had contrived to measure the floe thickness and snow density. They had seen the tracks of the Arctic fox and polar bear, but they had actually seen only twelve seals, four gulls, a little auk, a flight of duck and two long-tailed jaegers in the five months they had spent in this icy wilderness. Some Arctic explorers had theorised that you could survive by hunting in the Arctic Ocean, but Wally’s team would have gone very hungry on what they had observed and certainly could not have fed the dogs!
This was becoming a disturbingly relevant topic, for the little radio – their only link with the outside world – had developed a fault. Without it they would be unable to guide in the supply aircraft, and it was unlikely that they could be found without an exact fix on their location. After two days’ nerve-wracking struggle they managed to discover the fault, a broken wire coming in from the power source. A day later they had a glimpse of the sun through the clouds, made a fix and were able to radio their position.
They had now reached their destination for the summer, a large and solid-looking floe that seemed as if it would survive both the long summer melt and any battering the seas might give it. On 12 July a Canadian Air Force Hercules brought their supplies for the summer – food, fuel, replacement clothing, tentage and scientific instruments for Fritz Koerner’s research programme. For a few weeks, until the ice hardened up once again, they could relax, relying on the constant drift of the current to carry them towards the Pole. Although relatively warm, with the temperature just above freezing, it was misty, miserable, very humid and they saw the sun through a screen of drizzle. There was always some tension. Would the floe survive through the summer; It had already split once, only 300 feet from the little village of tents the press had named Meltville. On another day, one of the very few fine, cloudless days they had, their floe was invaded by a polar bear and its two cubs. Alerted by the yapping and snarling of the dogs, they had no choice but to kill the bears before the dogs were killed or scattered. Ken Hedges had grabbed a rifle, but it jammed and it was Wally who shot the bear and cubs. They were all shocked by the incident but Ken particularly so, both because of the failure of his rifle and also by the necessity for killing these magnificent, beautiful yet deadly animals.
They were still behind schedule and Wally wanted to start out again as early as possible to try to make some more progress across the floes before the arriva
l of winter. When they set out on 4 September, the temperature had dropped to below freezing – but only just. The surface of the slushy snow covering the ice was frozen into a thin crust which broke at almost every step and they sank through to their knees into the icy, soggy mush. At the cost of constant, exhausting effort they were making only two miles or so a day. Everything was wet and their way was forever barred by open leads between the floes. Inevitably, tempers were short and the stress within the group came closer and closer to the surface. After Fritz had a blazing row with Ken over tactics, he and Wally talked over the problem:
‘Once again, we found ourselves talking about the relationship between Ken and the rest of the party – which was clearly strained. The incompatibility did not manifest itself in dramatic outbursts but in a deep and nagging disapproval of each other’s ideas and ideals. It was like a marriage that had failed in spite of efforts on both sides to make a go of it. The big question, not unlike the married couple’s, was whether to put an end to the relationship before the winter set in [Ken could be sent out on a light aircraft which would attempt to land about 25 September to bring in some delicate scientific instruments], or whether out of respect for the institution of “the polar expedition” (as with couples who respect the institution of matrimony), we should stick it out to the end. Both Allan and Fritz felt Ken should be sent out. To Ken, a devout man, forgiveness and reconciliation were not only basic principles of his faith but a solution he considered dignified and honourable. While I agreed with Allan and Fritz, I felt bound as leader of the expedition to give Ken the opportunity to see the expedition through to the end for his own sake and for the sake of those whom, in a sense, he represented.’
Quest for Adventure Page 37
