The journey was by no means over but at least they were now making some fast times, the four sledges stretched out over several miles, following in each other’s tracks, heading ever southwards towards Spitsbergen. It became something of a mad gallop. Fritz Koerner remembers:
‘You’d make a frantic dash in the morning to get off first because whoever was off first led. It was quite childish really. It was a mad rush to pack. Allan and I would just bundle everything into a couple of tarpaulins, chuck them into the sledges and then go like hell to the other side of the first pressure ridge, where we would pack things a bit better and then tear off again, to make sure that we were first. Wally and Ken were much more methodical. Wally even had a special place for his ice axe, though I think Ken was the most efficient of all.
‘Once out in front, you’d stay there all day. Allan wasn’t meant to lead, because of his back, but every now and then he’d catch me up and he’d say, “Look, Uncle Ben’s out of the way, what if I lead for a bit?” We called Ken Uncle Ben – the very fact that we had a different name for him showed that he was away from us. And I’d say, “Sure”. And away he’d go.
‘Then Wally would come up at the end of the day and he’d quietly say, “Allan led a bit, didn’t he?” And I’d say, “How the bloody hell did you know?” “Oh, I noticed the tracks curling round the other set.”’
They were all tired, underfed and stretched to the limit, both physically and mentally. It was a race with the summer melt, for they had to reach solid land before the southern edges of the pack ice began to break and drift off into the Atlantic. There were plenty of crises to test them still further. The tent Allan and Fritz were sharing was burnt down one day, when they left the Primus stove unattended. The tent could be patched up, but Allan’s sleeping bag was badly damaged and most of his spare clothes destroyed. Ken Hedges very nearly lost his sledge and dogs when he tried to cross a wide lead. The others came up only just in time to rescue them. There was the constant threat of marauding polar bears, who became more numerous the further south they went. But the ice was very much smoother than it had been on the approach to the Pole and they were making good, fast progress. There were signs of land, an old tree trunk sticking out of an ice floe, seashells and moss on the surface of the ice, an increase in bird life.
Then, on 23 May, Wally saw some piled clouds on the distant horizon. They looked like the kind of clouds you would see above a mountain range. That evening he was able to pick out the exposed rocky peaks jutting up into the sky. They were very much at the end of their journey. But the ice floes were now beginning to break up, and there was a real risk of being swept out into the open sea before they could actually make a landfall. The frigate, HMS Endurance, had sailed up towards Spitsbergen to meet them and could always rescue them by helicopter, but this just would not have been the same. There now seemed little hope of reaching the shores of Spitsbergen, but there were some small islands just to the north and they decided to go for these.
No longer on the permanent pack ice, they were dodging from the haven of one small floe to the next, at the mercy of currents and wind, heading for Phipps Island, a little pile of barren rocks jutting out of the ice. To reach it they had to cross wide areas of broken mush ice, manoeuvring from ice block to ice block. It was probably the most dangerous moment of the entire journey. Wally described it:
‘Our route back to the floe was cut off. The whole floating mass of ice rubble was simmering like some vast cauldron of stew. We rushed from one sledge to another as each in turn jammed in the pressure, or lurched as the ice which was supporting it relaxed or heaved; at one point my sledge turned completely turtle and ran awkwardly over a six-foot drop from one block of ice to another.’
They spent a frightening, uncomfortable part of a night on a tiny floe. They had failed to reach Phipps Island and were being swept to the north, but there was an even smaller island in the path of their drift. On 29 May they were close enough to make a dash across the broken mush ice to the island. Fritz stayed behind on the floe, to keep an eye on the camp, and Wally gestured Allan and Ken to make a dash for the land. Wally wrote: ‘It was some moments before the full significance of what Allan and Ken had done got through to me and, when it did, it was through a small chunk of granite Ken pressed into my hand. “Brought you a small bit of the island,” he said.’
They had completed their crossing of the Arctic Ocean, without doubt one of the greatest and most exacting journeys ever made. They had been very dependent upon air support, but it is unlikely that they could have attempted the journey without it. In many ways, the stresses within the team and how each man somehow came through makes the achievement even more impressive. In the short period that the four had to wait for the helicopter to pick them up and take them back to that big, wide world, of receptions, press conferences and questions, Wally, as any leader would, desperately sought unity within the team, wanting the story of their achievement to have the weight and majesty it deserved as one of the great polar journeys of all time. There was a long and bitter argument over how much of their differences should be revealed but, finally, they all agreed to present a united front.
The helicopter from Endurance came sweeping in and hovered down on to their little ice floe. The captain of Endurance jumped out, shook hands with Wally and the rest of the team. The journey was over. The stress, depressions, despair and discomfort of the past fifteen months were now something of the past. In the wardroom of Endurance Ken was laughing and joking with the ship’s officers, providing a fund of amusing stories from the past months, most of which for him had been a nightmare. Allan Gill was already thinking of his next trip out into the empty wastes of the Arctic, while Fritz was absorbed by the vast mass of work he had in front of him from his scientific observations during the journey.
And Wally – this journey represented six years of hard, grinding effort, of solitary work and responsibility, of endless obstacles, many of which had seemed insuperable at the time. He had overcome them all. He had been successful. But success is so very ephemeral and, for Wally, that success was tainted. Somehow, the achievement did not gain the recognition that he felt and I believe it most certainly did deserve.
In the early part of the century there was a huge, devouring interest in all things polar. The early polar explorers were international heroes whose names really were household words. In 1969, however, Wally Herbert’s journey across the top of the earth gained scant attention. It was the time of the moon shots. Apollo XI had gone into orbit round the moon only a few days before Wally made his landfall; Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon just a few weeks later. The media and the rest of the world, craning their necks into space and obsessed with fast-moving technology, hadn’t time to follow the slow, laborious movement of four men with their dog teams, across the top of their own planet.
It was only in the New Year’s Honours List for the new millennium that Wally Herbert’s huge achievement has been publicly recognised with a well-deserved knighthood. His journey remains the longest polar trek of all time.
– Chapter 15 –
The Last Great First
Round the world non-stop by balloon
The race was on. It had started just before the first edition of Quest for Adventure was published in 1981, with an attempt by Maxie Anderson and Don Ida who set out from Luxor in Egypt and travelled 2,800 miles before being forced to land near the village of Murchpur in India, after their canopy had sprung a leak. The circumnavigation was only completed in the spring of 1999, eighteen years later. Arguably this was the last of the great firsts, a challenge on the same scale as the first ascent of Everest or reaching the Poles.
The very concept of ballooning, of trusting one’s life to a huge bag of gas or hot air and the vagaries of the winds, has a romance unequalled by any other adventurous activity. True, technology was to play an important part in eventual success, in the design of balloon and capsule, and with the use of satellite met. reports and co
mmunications. However, the final arbiter remained the pattern of the winds and the balloonists’ ability to read them, and their only steering aid was to gain or lose height to try to catch the wind direction they sought.
The people involved were also interesting in their different ways. It is undoubtedly a rich person’s sport – Anderson, Abruzzo, Branson and Fossett all fall into that bracket. But wealth was not an essential, as shown by the team who finally succeeded – Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Brian Jones, an ex-Warrant Officer in the Royal Air Force.
As with all human advances it was an evolutionary process with each group learning from the experience of their predecessors. After Double Eagle, flown by Max Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman, made the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic, Abruzzo and Newman began to consider the greater challenge of the Pacific, crossing it with Ron Clark and Rocky Aoki in November 1981. They set out from Japan in a huge helium balloon on 9 November to land, four days later, on a wooded mountainside near Covello, California.
Up to this time all the long record-breaking flights had been made by helium balloons and although hot-air balloonists were also stretching their limits they were still a long way behind in terms of performance. In 1980 their record distance was still only 480 miles. It was in 1986 that Per Lindstrand, a balloonist from Sweden, phoned Richard Branson, who had just captured the Blue Riband for his speed boat crossing of the Atlantic, to suggest he undertook an even greater challenge, the first crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. This would mean flying five times further than anyone had flown a hot-air balloon before and staying in the air three times longer.
Lindstrand, who had been a fighter pilot in the Swedish Air Force, had stumbled across ballooning as a result of a ski accident that left him with a leg in plaster and grounded from flying. He bet his fellow officers that, if he couldn’t walk in the next month, he’d fly across the airfield. To win the bet he stitched together some surplus parachute canopies, welded a frame and some burners and put together his first hot-air balloon, which he duly flew over the airfield. It triggered a career both as a balloonist and balloon manufacturer, based initially in Ireland then moving to Oswestry in England. He was planning to build the biggest hot-air balloon ever to carry all the fuel needed for the burners and then to fly at 30,000 feet to use the jet stream to blast them across the Atlantic.
Branson was intrigued, commenting:
‘As I studied Per’s proposal, I realised with amazement that this vast balloon, a huge ungainly thing which would swallow the Royal Albert Hall without showing a bulge, was actually intended to cross the Atlantic Ocean in far less time than our Atlantic Challenger boat with its 4,000-horsepower engine. Per reckoned on a flying time of under two days, with an average speed of ninety knots compared with the boat’s speed of just under forty knots. It would be like driving along in the fast lane of the motorway only to be overtaken by the Royal Albert Hall travelling twice as fast.’
Branson invited Per to come and see him, confessed to finding it difficult to understand all the technical details of Per’s plan, but asked him whether he had any children. On learning that he did, Branson stood up shook him by the hand and told him, ‘I’ll come, but I’d better learn how to fly one of these things first’.
It was to be the start of a long partnership. Richard Branson is undoubtedly an adventurer. An entrepreneurial and innovative businessman, happy to take risks with scant regard for convention, he is certainly the most colourful and arguably the most engaging of all the post-war entrepreneurs. He came from a close-knit, loving and reasonably comfortably off family background but had a difficult schooling because of his dyslexia. His start as a college dropout selling cut-price tapes led to the founding of his company, Virgin Records. This was followed by his expansion into so many different fields, most famously Virgin Atlantic Airways, that led to his David and Goliath battle with British Airways. He undoubtedly enjoys his high profile, as a showman delighting in the razzmatazz of show business, and is happy to use his wealth to pursue adventurous projects that attract him. These are of the record-breaking kind: winning the Blue Riband on the Atlantic and being first to cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. They were also adventures that he could take part in at a low skill level and ones that would offer a positive commercial advantage. What better advertising hoarding could you get than a giant balloon?
On the Atlantic crossing Chay Blyth had been skipper; now Per Lindstrand was in charge. Branson did his best to get fit and learn the basics but this was within the frame of a demanding business life of meetings, deals and financial crises. The miracle was that he had the energy and drive to pursue these external adventures and even get his balloon licence after a week’s intensive course in Spain.
All too often there seems to be an element of the unexpected, almost chaos, in everything to do with ballooning. Perhaps, in part, it is the nature of the sport itself, of trusting this canopy of heated air to the whims of the weather. At take off the balloon, still anchored to the ground like a gigantic Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians, is vulnerable to every breath of wind. Every return to earth is a crash landing, once again hostage to the force of the wind.
The take off in Maine, on 1 July 1987, was no exception. The wind was building up as Branson and Lindstrand climbed aboard. Inside the womb-like capsule, they were unaware that in the launch one of the tethering cables had caught round two of their propane fuel tanks and had torn them off as the balloon bucked in the wind. Freed of the weight, the balloon tore even harder at the remaining cables and shot into the sky trailing a couple of cables with bags holding 400 pounds of sand still attached.
Like it or not, their voyage had started. Per had to climb out on to the gondola to cut the bags free as they soared into the sky towards the jet stream. Soon they were being carried along at over 100 miles per hour, towards the dawn. Except for one storm their journey was fast and furious all the way across the Atlantic, reaching speeds of a 160 miles per hour, although in the gondola there was little sensation of movement. They were borne along in the racing mass of air.
It took them just twenty-nine hours to cross the Atlantic to the coast of Northern Ireland. The challenge then was to land safely and the very speed of their crossing posed a problem for they still had three full tanks of fuel. Per wanted to get rid of these before making a landing and therefore turned off the burners in order to descend and find an empty field in which to dump the tanks. Unfortunately, an eddy of wind caught them and drove them down to hit the ground while still travelling at around thirty-five miles per hour. They were dragged bouncing across the field and in the process lost all their fuel canisters and radio antenna. Then, with the loss of weight, they were catapulted back into the sky. They narrowly missed hitting a house and some power lines, had just one small reserve fuel tank left and the gondola was spinning like a top, thus closing down the mouth of the balloon so the burners could no longer heat the air inside. They had lost all their power and were in semi-darkness inside the gondola. It was chaos.
Deprived of the heat from the burners, the balloon was now falling. Branson climbed out of the hatch and with his knife hacked at the cable that had snagged causing the gondola to spin. The balloon was just 300 feet above the ground. It was at last stable but travelling fast because of the wind.
‘I’ll try to put her down on the shore,’ shouted Lindstrand.
But as they dropped through the thick grey cloud they saw with horror that they had already cleared Northern Ireland and were heading out over a storm-wracked Irish Sea. Lindstrand was trying to juggle between bursts of heat from the burners and releasing hot air from the top of the balloon to manage a controlled descent. Branson had put on his life jacket and collected their rubber dinghy which was attached to him by a cord. Per had been too busy trying to control the balloon even to get his life jacket on.
They hit the sea and were being hauled, bouncing over the waves with the capsule on its side. It was time to separate from the
balloon. This was a matter of pulling the lever that activated explosive charges in the retaining bolts that would tree the gondola from the cables leading up to the balloon. But this was easier said than done as they were being hurled all over the place and couldn’t reach the lever. At last Per managed to get there and heaved on the red lever. Nothing happened. The charge had failed.
‘Get out, Richard,’ Per shouted. ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of this.’
Per was out first, squeezing up through the hatchway, followed by Branson. They were being towed through the bucking black angry waves by the canopy of the balloon acting like a giant chute in the wind. Clinging on to the cables on top of the angled gondola, buffeted by the wind, drenched in spray, it was a terrifying, out-of-control situation. A bigger gust started to lift them.
‘We’ve got to jump,’ shouted Per and leapt for the sea. The gondola immediately bucked higher with the loss of his weight. Branson froze as the raging sea dropped away from him. He was quickly too high to jump.
Per was down in the ocean without a life jacket or dinghy and Branson was in the gondola, rocketing up into the sky, with all too little knowledge of how to bring it back down again. In their fast flight across the Atlantic, Per had done most of the flying. Branson describes his predicament:
‘I climbed back into the capsule. It was now the right way up and I felt reassured to see the screens and controls the way they had been as we crossed the Atlantic. I ran through the options: I could parachute into the sea, where nobody would be likely to find me and I could drown; or I could sail up into the darkening sky and try a night landing, should I be lucky enough to reach land. I picked up the microphone, but the radio was still dead. I had no contact with the outside world.’
Quest for Adventure Page 39
