Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  At least three of them could, on occasion, talk it out among themselves with a sense of unity, but it must have been much more difficult for Ken who inevitably felt totally isolated and must have sensed that the others were talking behind his back.

  But the struggle went on; their way was now barred by a strip of mush ice about 200 feet wide at its narrowest point. It was a jumble of everything from ten-foot blocks to a porridge-like mush, held together only by the pressure of the two big floes on either side. The nightmare thought was of being caught in the middle of the strip when the pressure from the two floes was released. Should they drift apart only a few feet, the larger blocks would capsize and plunge, the mush would dissipate and dogs, sledges and men would be struggling in the heaving, tumbling sea. Wally and Fritz had gone ahead to find a way over the strip, but it was too wide, too chaotic. Discouraged, they returned to be confronted by an even greater crisis.

  Allan was sitting, huddled in the snow, beside his sledge, his face contorted in agony. The previous day he had pulled a muscle in his back, but this was something which was obviously very much worse. He was unable to move and in extreme pain. Quickly, they erected a tent and somehow manoeuvred him into it. Ken diagnosed that Allan had either badly slipped a disc or torn a muscle and gave him a morphine injection. Whichever it was, it was essential to get him evacuated as soon as possible, but before that could be done they had to find somewhere safer to camp. They were on a very small floe that was already beginning to break up. Fritz and Wally went back to search for the floe on which they had spent the summer and had left only a few days before. It was only a few miles away and when they returned Ken reported that Allan’s condition had not improved. Wally sent out the first news of the accident stating: ‘If no miraculous recovery within next few days, will have to ask ARL to fly him out in the Cessna that brings the geophysical equipment. Need with the utmost urgency a replacement ex-Falkland Islands Dependency or ex-British Antarctic Survey geophysicist. Renner first choice.’

  After a few days’ rest, Allan Gill was fit enough to be moved and they carried him, carefully strapped on to a sledge, back to the big floe on which they had spent the summer. But in these few days, as so often happens after any catastrophe, they were beginning to reassess the situation. Allan was feeling a little bit better. They were not going to be able to move now until after the winter. He could not come to much harm resting in their winter quarters and, if he did recover, he would be able to complete the journey with them after all. Wally and Fritz even concocted some other schemes. They had been trying to hand over their winter quarters, complete, to another research organisation, so that their scientific work could be carried on through the following summer. Should Allan be unfit to travel, he could stay on at the winter hut to run the scientific programme with Ken Hedges to look after him. This would free Wally and Fritz for their dash to Spitsbergen. Plans floated back and forth in their tiny microcosm but they were also linked to the big, outside world, were dependent on it for supplies and the winter hut, and unfortunately had already involved their Committee, 6,000 miles away in London, in the decision making.

  Wally now told Ken Hedges that they had decided that Allan would stay for the winter; there was no need for him to be lifted out straight away, but Ken thought differently, pointing out that Allan needed hospital treatment if he were not to risk suffering for years from a weak back. He could even be crippled for life. Ken was not moved by Allan’s plea that he was prepared to take the risk and stated that if Wally ignored his advice he would have no other choice but to resign from the expedition, though he would remain with Allan to care for him as long as he was on the ice.

  It was a stalemate. It was also another crisis both for the expedition and for Ken. This was the first occasion when his own expertise had been needed, and the other three had rejected it. One can sympathise with and understand both stances. As so often happens, there was no clearly right course to take, but it certainly accentuated the split within the expedition still further. If Ken had felt isolated before, it was very much worse now. Ken gave Wally his medical report on Allan, addressed to the Commandant of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and asked him to send it out. The following day Wally sent out his own assessment of the situation to the Committee, recommending that Allan Gill should be allowed to stay through the winter and be evacuated the following spring, should this still be necessary. A few days went by and then the fatal message arrived: ‘While recognising Allan’s great wish to winter, we regretfully decided that on medical grounds and to enable earliest possible start next spring, he must, repeat must, be evacuated in Phipps’ plane. A three-man party is regarded as the minimum acceptable risk, therefore Wally, Ken and Fritz to winter and complete journey.’

  Wally was furious. In effect, the Committee, sitting in a cosy London office all those thousands of miles away, were taking over the command of the expedition and making operational decisions over his head. Confronted by the two conflicting opinions on the fitness of a member of the team, the Committee had to act as arbiter and had no real choice but to back the medical opinion, inevitably supported by the Commandant of the RAMC, against the opinion of the expedition leader. Wally described the impact their judgement made on him:

  ‘Ken was with me at the time the message came through. I read it out with difficulty for the words stuck in my throat ... Ken went back ahead of me to the tent where Allan and Fritz were having a brew; I walked around for a while trying to get a grip on what I suppose was a mixture of anger and the deepest personal sympathy for my old sledging companion. I crawled through the tent and squatted on a box at the foot of Ken’s bed. Allan and Fritz looked up expectantly.

  "You’ve shot your bolt, mate. They want you out.”’

  It is not surprising that Wally exploded that night over the radio to Squadron Leader Freddie Church, their communications linkman at Point Barrow. They used to chat for half an hour each day on a seldom-used frequency, and Wally had come to treat it as a direct, private conversation which must have been an important therapeutic release for him. Now, speaking about the Committee’s decision, Wally said into the microphone, ‘They don’t know what the bloody hell they are talking about’. It was the exasperated outburst that any of us might have made to a close friend, knowing that it would go no further. But Peter Dunn, the Sunday Times correspondent who was covering the story, had made quite sure that he, also, was in the little radio shack that day. Freddie Church had had no chance to warm Wally of this and Peter Dunn heard the entire outburst. Freddie tried to persuade Peter Dunn that this was confidential, that it could destroy Wally’s career if his remarks were publicised, but Dunn, the newsman, was adamant. Someone else could have been listening in to the conversation and to protect himself with his own paper he had to send the story out. He did so, with an embargo that it should not be published without his clearance. The cable arrived in London on the Monday, when the staff of Sunday papers take a rest day. But the duty sub-editor, recognising it was hot news, passed it on to The Times – but left out Peter Dunn’s embargo. The newsdesk of The Times immediately saw it as a headline scoop and had it set up for the following day’s paper. It was only just before going to print that editor, William Rees-Mogg, felt he should warn Wally’s Committee what he was doing. He phoned Sir Miles Clifford first, but he was out of the country. He then phoned Sir Vivian Fuchs, the deputy Chairman. Fuchs was appalled that this had been leaked to the press and even threatened The Times with an injunction, but Rees-Mogg responded, quoting their right to publish anything they wanted about the expedition – and did so. Up to this moment the rest of the media had taken comparatively little interest in the expedition but now, with a big juicy scandal, they seized upon the story, besieging Fuchs and the other members of the Committee for an explanation. Caught off-balance, anxious to justify their actions, the Committee muttered about Wally Herbert suffering from ‘winteritis’ – a condition of isolation and stress that can cloud judgement and become a danger to all concerned.r />
  But the expedition had to go on. They were now due to have an airdrop of the prefabricated hut and all their supplies for the winter. This came in on time. But Wally was determined to keep Allan with them if he possibly could and luckily for him the smooth, new ice around them was undoubtedly on the thin side for a light plane to land. Very soon it would be too dark. So ice and weather conditions collaborated to prevent the plane landing and, in the meantime, Allan Gill was showing positive signs of recovery, hobbling around the camp and doing his best to help in the day-to-day work wherever he could. The autumn progress had been negligible. In the eight days they had been moving they had covered only six and a half miles. They were now 240 miles short of the scheduled wintering place, but even so they set to and started to prepare themselves for the winter, assembling the little hut, building primitive furniture and preparing the various scientific programmes they planned to pursue – while the floe on which they were living would, they hoped, drift steadily closer to the North Pole.

  They were faced with six months of immobility, much of the time in total darkness, squeezed into a tiny hut whose floor space was about fifteen feet square. Each man had his own little area. Ken built a nook of shelves around his bed, with a blanket to give himself some privacy; he was to disappear behind it, into his own little world, for days on end, coming out only to relieve his bodily functions. Wally built a packing-case desk on which he could work on his reports and the book he would have to produce at the end of the expedition, while Fritz had an area devoted to his scientific work. Allan opted for sleeping throughout the winter outside in one of the tents, where it was bitterly cold, but at least he could get away from the tension of that tiny hut.

  There was external stress as well. On 20 November, when they were plunged in perpetual darkness, the floe cracked only 250 feet from the hut, between them and some of the supply dumps they had laid out scattered over the floe. They could hear the cracking and groaning of the ice, interspersed with staccato cracks, as the floes jostled and ground against each other in the black night. Picking their way across their floe by the light of hurricane lanterns, they saw that what had been a substantial island was now reduced to one half a mile long and only 800 feet wide. Wally and Fritz set out with dog teams and found a more substantial home for the rest of the winter about two miles away. The next few days were spent in relaying their twenty-seven tons of food, fuel, other supplies and, finally, the prefabricated hut to the site of their new home, all this in the dark, in temperatures of around –35 °C.

  And then back to the routine of scientific work for ten hours a day – of cooking and washing up, of reading and sleeping, all in the unchanging dark and cold. Added to the stress of their uneven relationship was the worry of whether they would be able to complete their journey at all; they were so far behind their schedule, so far from the North Pole, let alone from Spitsbergen. Allan Gill exercised quietly, slowly building up his mobility and strengthening his back. He was determined to finish the course if he possibly could. Ken Hedges, isolated and now in a profound depression created by a near-insufferable situation, was still equally determined to complete the expedition.

  At this stage Fritz Koerner was probably the least unhappy member, for he was totally involved in a massive scientific programme, too extensive for one man to carry out. He was working flat out throughout the winter, going out in all weathers to check his instruments, exercising at the same time both himself and his dog team, working for hours over his figures and snatching the minimum of sleep.

  They had relied on drifting steadily towards the Pole, but their star shots showed that the progress was more of an erratic zigzag. Yet through the winter they did slowly drift closer to their goal. And, as the winter slipped by, they started preparing for their journey the following spring. Wally built a snow house out of blocks in which each one of them worked on his own new sledge which had been dropped in with all the other supplies, strengthening the framework, sewing harnesses and making sure that everything was ready for their dash to Spitsbergen.

  There were still plans to fly Allan Gill out in the early spring and Geoff Renner had been brought to Point Barrow to replace him. Wally was quietly determined, however, to hang on to Allan if he possibly could. He wanted to set out from his winter quarters on 25 February, still in the dark and cold of winter, to give them the maximum time to make the journey all the way to Spitsbergen. They were almost ready to go, the sledges part-packed on the 24th, when the seas decided for them. Suddenly the ice around them began to erupt in a terrifying icequake, splitting and breaking all around the hut. It was time to get out – fast. They finished packing, scrambled over opening leads to rescue dogs and loads and, still in the dark in temperatures of around –43 °C, set out on the last, and by far the longest, leg of their journey. They were carrying not only the food and supplies they were going to need in the next few months but also a huge load of scientific instruments and specimens, the fruits of Fritz Koerner’s work from the previous summer and all that winter.

  The journey to the Pole was even more fierce than the previous year. It was bitterly cold, with temperatures down to –50 °C. Even in the depths of winter the ice was no less active, heaving into rippling pressure ridges, breaking up into leads of black waters – even blacker than the sky above. They froze over in moments, but there was always the fear of the fresh ice breaking. They kept going for eight hours at a time; that was as much as they could manage in the bitter cold. Sometimes they only made a couple of miles, the broken ice was so bad. And it went on day after day, as they slowly clawed their way towards the Pole. They saw little of each other during the day. It was usually Fritz out in front, with Wally taking up the rear to give Ken, or anyone else, a helping hand. Allan Gill was usually just behind Fritz and would slip into the lead whenever he had a chance, though he was not meant to go out in front. Ken was nearly always in third position, infinitely methodical and careful in the way he packed his sledge, but travelling through the day in what seemed to Fritz a dream.

  There were moments of great beauty as well as excitement and danger. Wally wrote: ‘On 12 March we saw the sun for the first time since 6 October. It was a blood-red, beautiful sight after five months and seven days – a living, pulsating thing it seemed to be, slowly drifting on a sea stained red with the blood it released.’

  A few days later Wally, bringing up the rear, realised that he was being followed by a polar bear. His rifle was not loaded and the few rounds of ammunition he always carried were in the pocket of an anorak stuffed into the front of the sledge out of his reach. The bear was rapidly overtaking the sledge as Wally crawled along the top, screaming at the dogs to keep going, and dug out the anorak. By the time he had loaded his rifle the bear was only 150 feet away; he raised the rifle and pulled the trigger, but it had jammed in the cold. The bear was closing fast. In desperation Wally slapped the bolt with the palm of his hand; the rifle fired, sending a shot up into the air, but it was enough to alarm the bear which ambled away behind some ice blocks. This was just a few miles from the Pole.

  Allan was still due to be flown out once a plane could land near them; this was still a constant course of irritation within the party and Fritz, who was sharing a tent with Ken Hedges, had some blazing arguments on the subject. Not only was Wally trying to find every possible means of postponing a landing, but Fritz also had a feeling that Weldy Phipps, the pilot who was meant to fly in, was quietly conspiring to help Allan Gill remain with the crossing party by finding various excuses for not coming. And so, as the sun slowly crept up into the sky Allan who was by far the toughest and most attuned to this environment – in Wally’s words ‘the emotional anchorman of the party’ – stayed on with the expedition.

  On 5 April Wally calculated that they had, at last, reached the Pole. It looked like any other bit of ice, anywhere in the Arctic Ocean, but this was it – the very top of the world. Immediately Wally sent a message to the Queen to announce their achievement. And then, a few moments later,
Allan Gill, who had also been calculating the results, poked his head into the tent to announce that he thought they might be seven miles short. There followed an exhausting hide and seek game in slow motion, as they tried to find this elusive point. It took them another twenty hours of hard sledging before they finally satisfied themselves that they had truly reached it. Wally described the moment:

  ‘It had been an elusive spot to find and fix – the North Pole, where two separate sets of meridians meet and all directions are south. Trying to set foot upon it had been like trying to step on the shadow of a bird that was hovering overhead, for the surface across which we were moving was itself a moving surface on a planet that was spinning about an axis beneath our feet. We were dog tired and hungry. Too tired to celebrate our arrival on the summit of this super-mountain around which the sun circles almost as though stuck in a groove.’

  One cannot help wondering if Cook or Peary hadn’t fudged their calculations when standing exhausted in this featureless, shifting expanse of sea-borne ice some sixty years before. The Pole had, however, been reached overland the previous year, when Ralph Plaisted and his party drove their Skidoos from the region of Ellesmere Island, but then they had been flown back to the safety of land. That same summer of 1968, Roger Tufft, who had withdrawn from Wally’s expedition, had joined up with Hugh and Myrtle Simpson, a husband and wife team who combined science with polar and mountain adventures. They had tried to reach the Pole on skis, hauling their sledges and carrying all their food with them to be independent of airdrops. It was a simple, lightweight venture that had appealed to Roger. But the initial rough ice had been too difficult, their gear inadequate, and they had been forced to abandon their attempt.

  Wally’s team were undoubtedly on the Pole; they had spent twenty-four precious hours making sure. They put the camera on a tripod and took a delayed-action shot of themselves standing, statuesque in their furs, by a laden sledge and an unfurled Union Jack. The picture has a nostalgic, slightly sad quality about it. It could have been taken sixty years before; the furs, the sledge, the bearded frosted figures would have looked just the same.