Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Over the next ten days I was reunited with twenty-two other cousins, one of whom, an alderman of Cape Town, showed me a family tree which proved he and I shared a close relationship with Karl Marx. I regret not having taken away a copy to shock the family back in England.

  We left South Africa three days before Christmas, passing by Cape Agulhas, the last land for 2,400 miles, and set a course south to Antarctica.

  Bothie, our Jack Russell, appointed himself ship’s mascot and, respecting no privacy, left calling-cards in all cabins. Ginny tried hard to remove all his indiscretions before they were discovered by the crew but it was an uphill struggle.

  The Observer, covering the expedition, sent Bryn Campbell to Antarctica with us to record the ship’s arrival. A four-man film team was also on board – provided by millionaire octogenarian Dr Armand Hammer, a friend of Prince Charles – intending to film the entire three-year journey by joining the team in the more accessible areas. The actor Richard Burton was to provide a background commentary.

  Swelling the ship’s complement still further were a number of oceanographers. At certain stages of the voyage there were eight scientists on board and at all times our own resident boffins, an Irishman and a Cape Town University researcher, worked with their bathythermographs and nets to study current patterns and the interaction of water bodies at sub-tropical and Antarctic convergences.

  Christmas spirits were dampened by a Force Eight storm which tore away the Christmas tree lashed to our mast and made eating rich festive fare a risky business. Giant Southern Ocean rollers forced the ship to list 47° both ways and, fearing the worst, I asked Anton if the ship could cope. His eyes glinted evilly and he proceeded to tell me a number of Antarctic shipwreck horror stories.

  As the old year slid away, we entered pack-ice and the sea slowly settled. Anton reflected that Scott and Shackleton had been active in these waters less than seventy years before. The skipper sent a lookout up to the crow’s nest to shout directions to the fo’c’sle through the antiquated intercom. The loose pack-ice yielded to our steel-clad bows and only once did we need to halt and slowly ram a new path through the floes.

  On 4 January 1980, we sighted the ice-cliffs of Antarctica and the same day gouged ourselves out a nest at Sanae, in the thin bay-ice of Polarbjorn Bite, where we could climb straight down a ladder on to the ice. The unloading of over 100 tons of mixed cargo, including 2,000 numbered boxes and 1,600 fuel drums, began at once.

  To ensure that the ship could leave before the pack solidified and cut off her escape, we raced to carry every item two miles inland to more solid ice. Everyone helped, even the film team. Our sole tow-machine apart from skidoos was a Groundhog rescued from Greenland but, in only eleven days, the complex operation was complete.

  Halfway through the unloading a storm broke up the ice and I watched from the bridge as eight drums of precious aircraft fuel sailed north on a floe. It was as if the bay-ice all about the ship were pieces of a jigsaw all coming apart at the same moment.

  Our steward Dan Hicks, a permanently merry character, drank too much whisky and fell off the gangplank, floating belly-up between the hull and the ice-edge, in imminent danger of being crushed, until someone hauled him out on a boathook. One of the engineers slipped and broke three ribs and Bothie lost a fight with an angry chinstrap penguin. The chief engineer, who had hoisted his Honda motorbike on to the ice for a quick ride, lost the machine for ever during a storm. Otherwise the unloading went well and those of us who were to stay behind waved goodbye to the ship and crew on 15 January. All being well, they would pick us up again in a year or so, 2,000 miles away on the far side of the frozen continent.

  Ten days later, in conditions of nil visibility, Ollie, Charlie and I took our skidoos and laden sledges on a 370-kilometre journey inland to set up a base on the high polar plateau in which to spend the next eight months of polar winter and the long disappearance of the sun. The base-site beneath Ryvingen Mountain was chosen because of its height above sea-level and its distance inland, the furthest which the Twin Otter could be expected to reach carrying a 2,000-pound cargo load. We hoped, by wintering at 6,000 feet, to become acclimatised to the bitter conditions before the main crossing journey the following summer, when the average height would be 10,000 feet above sea-level. Until we reached our winter site we would be simple travellers. But once south of our camp, we would become true explorers of one of earth’s last untrodden regions. For 900 miles we would pass through terrain neither seen nor touched by mankind. Oliver would be mapping this whole unexplored area using an aneroid barometer, as he had been trained to do by the British Antarctic Survey.

  The Twin Otter flew in Ginny, Bothie and four cardboard huts Ginny had designed, and the race began to prepare our camp for the long winter. The Twin Otter crew completed their seventy-eighth ferry flight from Sanae to Ryvingen and we wished them a safe flight back to Britain via the Falkland Islands and Argentina.

  The weather clamped down on the ice-fields, travel for any distance became impossible and we were soon cut off from the outside world. We were 400 miles from and unreachable by the nearest humans, the twelve South African scientists in their snow-buried seaside hut at Sanae. For eight months we must survive through our own common sense. Should anyone be hurt or sick there could be no evacuation and no medical assistance. We must daily handle heavy batteries, generator power lines and heavy steel drums, but avoid the hazards of acid in the eye, serious tooth trouble, appendicitis, cold burns, fuel burns or deep electrical burns. Temperatures would plunge to –50°C and below. Winds would exceed ninety knots and the chill factor would reach –84°C. For 240 days and nights we must live cautiously and mostly without sunlight.

  After a few days the huts disappeared under snow drifts, and all exits were blocked. So I dug tunnels under the snow and stored all our equipment inside them. In two months I completed a 200-yard network of spacious tunnels with side corridors, a loo alcove, a thirty-foot-deep slop-pit and a garage with pillars and archways of ice.

  Since our huts were made of cardboard with wooden struts and bunks and our heaters burned kerosene we were apprehensive of fire. A Russian base, 500 miles away, had been burnt out the previous winter and all eight occupants were found asphyxiated in an escape tunnel with blocked hatches.

  Katabatic winds blasted our camp and snuffed out our fires through chimney back-blow. We experimented with valves, flaps and crooked chimneys, but the stronger gusts confounded all our efforts. The drip-feed pipe of a heater would continue to deliver fuel after a blow-out and this could cause a flash-fire unless great care was taken on re-lighting the heater.

  Generator exhaust pipes tended to melt out sub-snow caverns which spread sideways and downwards. One day Oliver discovered a fifteen-foot-deep cave underneath the floor of his generator hut. He moved his exhaust system time and again but nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning three times despite being alert for the symptoms.

  Without power from the generators, Ginny’s radios would not work, so our weather reports, which Oliver must send out every six hours, could not be fed into the World Meteorological System, nor could Ginny’s complex, very low frequency (VLF) recording experiments for Sheffield University and the British Antarctic Survey be undertaken. So we fought hard against snow accumulation in certain key areas of the camp.

  At night in the main living hut we turned the heater low to save fuel. We slept on wooden slats in the apex of the hut roof and in the mornings there was a difference of 14° between bed level and floor temperature, the latter averaging –15°C.

  Ginny and I slept together on a single slat at one end of the hut, Oliver and Charlie occupied bachelor slats down the other end and Bothie slept in a cavity behind the heater. The long black nights with the roar of the wind so close and the linger of tallow in the dark are now a memory which I treasure.

  There was of course friction between us. Forced togetherness breeds dissension and even hatred between individuals and groups. After four years at wor
k together our person-to-person chemistry was still undergoing constant change. Some days, without a word being spoken, I knew that I disliked one or both of the other men and that the feeling was mutual. At other times, without actually going so far as to admit affection, I felt distinctly warm towards them. When I felt positive antagonism towards the others I could let off steam with Ginny, who would listen patiently. Or else I could spit out vituperative prose in my diary. Diaries on expeditions are often minefields of over-reaction.

  Each of us nursed apprehensions about the future. The thought of leaving the security of our cardboard huts for the huge unknown that stretched away behind Ryvingen Mountain was not something on which I allowed my thoughts to dwell.

  On 2 May the wind chill factor dropped to –79°C. Windstorms from the polar plateau blasted through the camp with no warning. Visiting Ginny’s VLF recording hut one morning, I was knocked flat by a gust, although a second earlier there had not been a zephyr of wind. A minute later, picking myself up, I was struck on the back by the plastic windshield ripped off my parked skidoo.

  Even in thirty-knot wind conditions we found it dangerous to move outside our huts and tunnels except by way of the staked safety lines which we had positioned all around the camp and from hut to hut. Charlie and I both lost the safety lines one day when an eighty-knot wind hurled ice-needles horizontally through the white-out. We groped separately and blindly in circles until we blundered into a safety line and so found our way to the nearest hut’s hatchway. That same day the parachute canopy covering the sunken area of Ginny’s antennae-tuning units was ripped off, and by nightfall two tons of snow had filled in her entire work area.

  Before the sun disappeared I taught Oliver and Charlie the rudiments of langlauf skiing, for I knew, if we succeeded in crossing Antarctica, that we would meet many regions in the Arctic where only skis would be practical.

  On a fine autumn day we left camp with laden sledges for a quick sixteen-kilometre manhaul trip to a nearby nunatak, a lonely rock outcrop. A storm caught us on the return journey and, within minutes, the wind had burned every patch of exposed skin and frostnipped our fingers inside their light ski mitts. At the time we were each moving at our separate speeds with a mile or so between us. This was not acceptable by current mountain safety practices but it was a system encouraged on all SAS training courses. The fewer individuals in a group, the faster the majority will reach their goal. This presupposes that the weakest link can look after himself. Oliver was last to arrive back at camp, his face and neck bloated with frostnip. For a week he took antibiotics until his sores stopped weeping.

  Ginny’s problems were mostly connected with her radio work. Conducting low-frequency experiments with faraway Cove Radio Station in Hampshire, she worked a 1.5 kva generator in the foyer to her hut. A freak wind once blew carbon monoxide fumes under her door. By chance I called her on a walkie-talkie and, receiving no reply, rushed along the tunnels and down to her shack. I found her puce-faced and staggering about dazed. I dragged her out into the fresh –49°C air and told the Cove Radio operator what had happened. Next day we received a worried message from their controller, Squadron Leader Jack Willes.

  Even in a comfortable environment the operation of electrical radio components is a hazardous operation. In your location the dangers are considerably increased . . . Remember that as little as thirty mA can kill. Never wear rings or watches when apparatus is live. Beware of snow from boots melting on the floor . . . Your one kilowatt transmitter can produce very serious radio frequency burns . . . Static charges will build up to several thousand volts in an aerial. Toxic berillium is employed in some of the components . . .

  Only four days later, with all her sets switched off and no mains power, Ginny touched the co-ax cable leading to her forty-watt set and was stunned by a violent shock that travelled up her right arm and ‘felt like an explosion in my lungs’. The cause was static, built up by wind-blown snow.

  Not being a technical expert, Ginny used common sense to repair her sets, replace tiny diodes and solder cold-damaged flex. When a one-kilowatt resistor blew and she had no spares, she thought of cutting a boiling ring out of our Baby Belling cooker. She then wired the cannibalised coil to the innards of her stricken radio and soon had everything working again, the home-made resistor glowing red-hot on an asbestos mat on the floor. The chief back at Cove Radio described her as ‘an amazing communicator’.

  To keep our little community happy, Ginny listened to the BBC World Service and produced The Ryvingen Observer. On 6 May we learned that the bodies of US airmen were being flown out of Iran following an abortive attempt to rescue American hostages, that Tito’s funeral was imminent, that SAS soldiers had killed some terrorists at the Iranian Embassy in London and that food in British motorway cafés had been summed up in a government report as greasy and tasteless.

  Bothie spent his days following Ginny from hut to hut. She kept old bones for him in each shack and dressed him in a modified pullover when the winds were high. I fought a non-stop battle with the terrier for eight months, trying to teach him that ‘outside’ meant right outside the tunnels as well as the hut. I lost the struggle.

  Charlie, in charge of our food, rationed all goodies with iron discipline. Nobody could steal from the food tunnels without his say-so, a law that was obeyed by all but Bothie. Our eggs, originally sponsored in London, were some eight or nine months old by mid-winter and, although frozen much of that time, they had passed through the tropics en route. To an outsider they tasted bad – indeed evil – but we had grown used to them over the months and Bothie was addicted. However hard Charlie tried to conceal his egg store, Bothie invariably outwitted him and stole a frozen egg a day, sometimes more.

  The months of June, July and August saw an increasing workload in the camp, due both to the scientific programme and our preparations for departure in October. The sun first came back to Ryvingen, for four minutes only, on 5 August, a miserably cold day. Down at our coastal Sanae base hut, Simon, overwintering with one other Transglober, Anto Birkbeck, recorded a windspeed in excess of 100 miles per hour. July 30 was our coldest day. With the wind steady at forty-two knots and a temperature of –42°C, our prevailing chill factor was –131°C, at which temperature any exposed flesh freezes in under fifteen seconds.

  In August Ginny had to complete a complex research task which involved working with two other remote Antarctic bases, Sanae and Halley Bay, to pick up Very Low Frequency signals emanating from the Arctic. All pick-up times (once every four minutes) had to be exactly synchronised between the three bases. But Ginny discovered the oscillation unit in her VLF time-code generator had failed due to the cold. To complete the VLF experiment without the instrument meant manually pressing a recording button every four minutes for unbroken twenty-four-hour periods. Wrapped in blankets in the isolated VLF hut she kept awake night after night with flasks of black coffee. By October she was dog-tired and hallucinating but determined to complete the three-month experiment.

  As the sunlit hours grew longer, the ice-fields reacted. Explosions sounded in the valleys, rebounding as echoes from the peaks all about us. Avalanches or imploding snow-bridges? There was no way of knowing.

  With departure imminent, I realised how much I had grown to love the simplicity of our life at Ryvingen, a crude but peaceful existence during which, imperceptibly, Ginny and I had grown closer together than during the bustle of our normal London lives. Now I felt pangs of regret that it was ending. Also tremors of apprehension. As the days slipped by my stomach tightened with that long-dormant feeling of dread – once so familiar during school holidays as the next term-time approached.

  ‘I wish you weren’t leaving,’ Ginny said.

  In the last week of October it should be warm in the –40s°C and light enough to travel at 10,000 feet above sea-level. Then we would attempt the longest crossing of the Antarctic continent, the first crossing attempt to use vehicles with no protective cabs for the drivers and the first to travel from side
to side, rather than split-teams approaching the Pole from both sides. The frozen land mass we must cross was bigger than Europe, the USA and Mexico combined, than India and China together, and far larger than Australia. The ice-sheet was five kilometres thick in places and covered 99 per cent of the entire continent. Four days before we set out, a news release through Reuters quoted the New Zealand Antarctic Division boss as criticising our intended journey as under-equipped and our skidoos as under-powered. The official view was that we would fail: it was ‘too far, too high and too cold’.

  On 29 October we left Ginny and Bothie in a drifted-over camp and headed south. The wind blew into our masked faces at twenty knots and the thermometer held steady at –50°C.

  Clinging to a straight bearing of 187°, we crossed the sixty-four kilometres to the Penck Escarpment, a steep rise of several hundred feet of sheet ice. Spotting the curve of a slight re-entrant, I tugged my throttle to full bore and began the climb, trying to will the skidoo on with its 1,200-pound load – a heavy burden for a 640cc two-stroke engine operating at 7,000 feet above sea-level. The rubber tracks often failed to grip on smooth ice, but always reached rough patches again before too much momentum was lost. Renewed grip and more power then carried me on – just – to the next too-smooth section. The ascent seemed interminable. Then came an easing of the gradient, two final rises, and at last the ridgeline. Fifteen hundred feet above our winter camp and forty miles from it I stopped and looked back. The peaks of the Borga Massif seemed like mere pimples in the snow, Ryvingen itself just a shadow.