We pressed south and by dusk there was no single rock feature in any direction. Only endless fields of snow. Nothing to navigate by but clouds and soon – once we left the weather-making features of sea and mountain behind us – there would not even be clouds.
On the second day, at –53°C, we climbed slowly into the teeth of high winds and a white-out, the true plateau still 4,000 feet above us. After four hours Oliver staggered off his skidoo and lurched over to me, his speech slurred. ‘Must stop. I’m getting exposure.’ We boiled water and gave him tea. He was physically the toughest of us and wore five layers of polar clothing. But the cold was cruel and wore us down hour after hour. We travelled for between ten and twelve hours a day.
The Transglobe Expedition’s route across Antarctica
That night Oliver wrote: ‘Very bad weather. I think we should have stayed in the tent.’ I saw his point but Greenland five years earlier had taught me that we could travel in high wind and white-out and every hour of progress, however slow, helped our slim chances of success. We had 2,200 miles to go, 900 of them unexplored.
I took a bearing check every ten minutes against the clouds: as these moved slowly and maintained their silhouettes for quite a while, they served me well. At times when partial white-outs hid sun and clouds, all I could do was aim my compass at imperfections in the snow ahead. When the sun shone I navigated by means of the shadows of a series of penknife-scratched lines on the plastic windshield of my skidoo. To check on the accuracy of this crude system and to put some life back into our frozen limbs, I stopped for five minutes in every hour. We always maintained a space of a mile between each of us so, as soon as I stopped, a backbearing on the two specks back along my trail provided a good check on the angle of travel.
For four days and nights the temperature hovered around –50°C, creating weird effects such as haloes, sun pillars, mock suns and parhelia.
In the mornings the skidoos were difficult to start. Any wrong move or out-of-sequence action caused long delays. Try to engage gear too soon and the drive belt shattered into rubber fragments. Turn the ignition key a touch too hard and it snapped off in the lock. Set the choke wrong and the plugs fouled up. Changing plugs at –50°C in a strong wind was a bitter chore which no one fancied.
Often the whole day would pass without a word spoken between us. Our routine was slick and included, after camping, the drill of ice-core samples at every degree of latitude, a full coded weather report by radio to the World Meteorological Organisation, and the taking of urine samples as part of our calorific intake programme.
Back at Sanae, our coastal base, Giles and Gerry had returned from England with the Twin Otter and took Simon up to help Ginny at Ryvingen. Every 300 or 400 miles we would run out of fuel and Giles would have to locate us from my theodolite position. In ten days’ travel we were 404 nautical miles from Ryvingen with a suspected major crevasse field just to our south. Since no man had been there before us, we had only satellite photographs from which to try to detect such obstacles.
On 9 November we ran into our first bad field of sastrugi, ridges of ice cut by the wind and resembling parallel lines of concrete tanktraps. Due to the prevalence of east-west winds, these furrows were diagonal to our southerly direction of travel. The sastrugi were from eighteen inches to four feet high and, being perpendicular, they often impeded any advance until we axed out a through-lane. They buckled our springs, bogey wheels and skis. Oliver struggled to improvise repairs.
At 80° South we camped in one spot for seventeen days to allow Giles to set up a fuel dump halfway between the coast and the Pole.
For weeks our progress was painfully slow. Sledges with smashed oak spars were abandoned, frequent overturns caused minor injuries, axe-work through sastrugi fields progressed sometimes at a mere 800 yards in five hours, and the ever-present fear of crevasses gnawed at our morale. One morning, stopping on an apparently harmless slope, Charlie stepped off his skidoo to stretch his legs and promptly disappeared up to his thighs. He was parked right over an unseen cavern, with less than two inches of snow cover between him and oblivion.
Close to 85° South, in a high sastrugi field, we had stopped for repairs when we heard from Ginny that a team of South African scientists, operating at the rim of the coastal mountains near Sanae, were in trouble. One of their heavy snow tractors had plunged sixty feet down a crevasse together with its one-ton fuel sledge. One man then fell ninety feet down another crevasse and broke his neck and their rescue party, returning to their coastal base, became lost in the ice-fields. They had, by the time Ginny contacted us, already been missing with minimal gear for five days. Already short of fuel and with a recurring engine start-up problem, highly hazardous in Antarctica, Giles nonetheless flew over 1,000 miles to search for, and eventually locate, the missing South African scientists. This saved their lives.
From 85° South we struggled on, detouring east to avoid a mammoth crevasse field and running into total white-out conditions. Navigation became critical and on 14 December, after nine hours of travel in thick mist, I stopped where I estimated the Pole should be. There was no sign of life, although a sixteen-man crew of US scientists worked in a domed base beside the Pole. We camped and l radioed the Pole’s duty signaller.
‘You are three miles away,’ replied a Texan twang. ‘We have you on radar . . . Come on in.’
He gave us a bearing and, an hour later, the dome loomed up a few yards to my front. At 4.35 a.m. on 15 December, 900 miles south of Ryvingen and seven weeks ahead of our schedule, we had reached the bottom of the world.
Giles flew Ginny, Bothie and Simon to the Pole, complete with the radio station stripped from Ryvingen. The temptation to spend Christmas Day with Ginny at the Pole was powerful, but we had to press on. With each passing day the crevasse systems between the polar plateau and the coast were growing more rotten, snow-bridges accumulated from drifts the previous winter were daily sagging and collapsing.
For five years I had tried to discover a straight-line descent route from the polar plateau to the coastal ice-shelf. The Scott Glacier appeared to be the straightest, but no one knew anything about it and I only had an aerial map to go by. This showed extensive crevassing at the glacier’s crest some 9,000 feet up, fractures in belts down its course and massed around its mouth where the ice debouched on to the ice-shelf 500 feet above sea-level.
We left the Pole on 23 December. I thought of Captain Scott, whose team had reached the Pole sixty-nine years earlier. ‘All daydreams must go,’ he had written, for his Norwegian rivals had arrived there first. ‘It will be a wearisome return.’ They never made it back.
From the Pole we steered north. Every direction was of course northerly but my compass setting was 261° for 180 miles. There were no sastrugi all the way and no crevasses, so we reached the plateau edge in only two days. At 5.00 p.m. on Christmas Day I stopped on a small rise and saw far ahead the summit of Mount Howe, guardian of the Scott Glacier Valley and the first natural feature we had seen in well over 1,000 miles. It made an excellent Christmas present. That night there was an air of apprehension in the tent, not in anticipation of Christmas stockings but through fear of the impending descent.
My map dotted Scott Glacier with vaguely delineated rashes of crevasse belts, an artist’s impression rather than an exact record from which an optimum compass course could be set. I decided to play Scott Glacier by ear rather than compass. Oliver changed all our carburettor jet settings for the lower altitudes and we swapped our one-metre sledge tow-lines for six-metre safety lines.
A series of east-west pressure swellings heralded the first obstacle. We breathed in as we passed over huge crevasses but all were bridged well enough to take the minimal ground pressure of our skidoos. The narrower fissures, from four to twenty feet wide, were the greater danger, for many were spanned by sagging snow-bridges that collapsed under the slightest weight.
Each time I crossed a relatively weak bridge, my sledge, heavier by far than my skidoo in terms of ground pressure, broke
through, partially, plunging a cascade of snow down into the fissure below. Only forward momentum saved the day at such times. Charlie, behind me, would have to find himself another crossing-point. So too, later, would Oliver.
The La Gorse range for which I was headed was soon obscured by mist, as were all other features, so we camped in the centre of a wide crevasse field. Next morning the white-out was still clamped about us and, impatient, I decided we should move on. This was perhaps a rash decision.
From about this period of the expedition Charlie underwent a subtle change that I cannot, to this day, explain. He radiated a muted hostility which never broke out into rage. Instead it simmered away month after month, nursing itself quietly.
After six years of working together with two men for whom I had no prior affection or common ground – save for the single desire to achieve Transglobe – the vicissitudes of our common experiences had slowly led me to grow fond of Oliver and to dislike Charlie. I disliked being disliked. Hostility bred hostility. I was fully aware that the major part of the expedition, and by far the more hazardous sector, lay ahead and that one of my two companions and I were silently at loggerheads. Since this situation was only known to the two of us and it was never openly acknowledged, I saw no reason why it should impair our chance of success, which was, after all, all that mattered. The fact remained that we worked well together and there were no arguments.
Our nightmare trail down the glacier led us into a cul-de-sac, surrounded by open crevasses. We retraced our tracks and tried again via another narrow corridor between blue ice-walls. A maze of sunken lanes beset with hidden falls finally released us, shaken but unhurt, close by the Gardner Ridge and 6,000 feet above our ice-shelf goal. In forty-knot winds and thick mist, we followed the Klein Glacier for twelve miles until forced along a narrow ice-spit between two giant pressure fields, a chaos of gleaming ice-blocks.
I knelt to study the map to find a way through, but the wind tore it away. I carried one spare chart with my navigation gear and, using it, plotted a course to the eastern side of the valley. Halfway through the smaller pressure field, a sudden drop revealed the lower reaches of Scott Glacier, a breathtaking show of mountain and ice-flow, rock and sky, dropping 600 metres to the far horizon and the pinnacles of the Organ Pipe Peaks. A crevasse field five miles deep crossed the entire valley from cliff to cliff and halted us short of Mount Russell, so we detoured east over a 1,000-foot-high pass and, three hours later, re-entered Scott Glacier – beyond the crevasse field – by way of a wicked ravine. We had travelled for fourteen hours and covered five days’ worth of scheduled progress. The next day our mad journey continued. More ice-walls and skidding, out-of-control sledges. At the foot of Mount Ruth we cat-footed along the ceiling of an active pressure lane as rotten as worm-eaten wood.
The last concentrated nightmare, south-west of Mount Zanuck, was a series of swollen icy waves pocked by broken seams.
Beyond the powerful in-flow of the Albanus Glacier the dangers lessened hour by hour until, at the final rock outcrop of Durham Point, there was nothing ahead but flat ice and the Pacific. We had reached the Ross Ice-shelf. Dog-tired, we camped after fifteen hours of travel and awoke next day to Oliver shouting, ‘Welcome to the tropics! It’s plus 1° on the thermometer.’
For nine further days I held to a bearing of 183°, which took us well north of the disturbed zone known as the Stagshead Crevasses. On the seventh day we crossed the 180° meridian which, at that point, is also the International Date Line. I experienced a zany temptation to zigzag north along it singing, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday.’
On the ninth day, passing the region where Oates groped his frostbitten way to a lonely but honourable death, we first saw the mushroom steam-cloud of Mount Erebus, a hundred miles distant but marker to our destination. Beneath the 13,000-foot volcano lies Scott Base where, on 11 January, we arrived at 6.00 p.m. We had crossed Antarctica in sixty-seven days.
Much of our strength, despite our lack of polar experience, lay in our collective ability – remove any one of us and the other two became a far less capable entity. Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened. Oliver’s wife Rebecca, from whom he had been separated – then re-united for the past few years – had grown sick with worry during the Antarctic crossing. Oliver was faced with the cruel choice of wife or Transglobe. He took the long-term option because he loved Rebecca more than his six-year-long ambition to achieve Transglobe’s goals.
Oliver’s loss caused wider problems than the mere mechanics of food supplies and weights to be carried in the Arctic. Back in London the committee who represented the expedition, including ex-SAS Brigadier Mike Wingate Gray, decided it would be irresponsible for us to attempt the northern hemisphere with a team of only two. They were solidly in favour of a third man, probably from the Royal Marines or SAS, being recruited to replace Oliver. A committee deputation to decide the issue of the third man was to be sent to meet us in New Zealand after the Benjamin Bowring penetrated the pack-ice again and removed us from Antarctica.
7
Full Circle
On arrival at Christchurch, New Zealand, I received a warning message from Anthony Preston, the ex-RAF man in charge of our London office. He had discovered that an American, Walt Pedersen – one of the 1968 team that reached the North Pole under Ralph Plaisted – was all set to sledge to the South Pole early next year. Determined to become the first man in the world to reach both Poles overland, he had spent twelve years getting his act together. It looked as though he would beat us to the double by four months, since the earliest we could hope to reach the North Pole would be April 1982. I reflected that virtually none of our Antarctic experience was applicable to our coming Arctic struggle. The two places were as alike as chalk and cheese.
Mike Wingate Gray, our chairman, Sir Vivian Fuchs and other key members of our London committee, held long meetings with Ginny, Charlie and me, but we could not agree to the recruiting of a third man. I resolved to put the final decision to our patron, Prince Charles, and at Sydney, where he opened our trade fair, I explained the whole problem to him in the skipper’s cabin. I was as firmly against taking on a replacement for Oliver as the committee were in favour of the idea. I quoted Wally Herbert who during his pioneering Arctic crossing stated: ‘As a two-man party we would travel harder, faster and more efficiently than as a three-man unit.’ I stressed to Prince Charles that Charlie and I had already spent six years together, including travel in Greenland, the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica. We knew each other’s limitations and strong points. We had worked out a mutually acceptable modus vivendi. Should a third man be forced on us, his very presence, no matter how we interacted with him, might undermine our own mutual compatibility for the Arctic crossing which we knew would be far more testing than Antarctica. The upshot of the various discussions was that Charlie and I should carry on alone, but Sir Vivian Fuchs warned me that if things should go wrong, the blame would be entirely mine.
On the Benjamin Bowring’s boat deck we gave Prince Charles three cheers and a miniature silver globe, marked with our route, to congratulate him on his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer. Bothie joined the cheering, yapping aggressively until Prince Charles patted and spoke to him.
While we were in Sydney, Charlie married the girl that he loved and Anton married Jill, our ship’s cook. The Benjamin Bowring was becoming quite a family ship. All in all the expedition was to witness seventeen marriages of its members to each other or to outsiders. One Daily Mail headline talked of ‘The Love Boat’.
From Sydney we steamed north over the Equator to Los Angeles, where President Reagan had kindly agreed to open our trade exhibition. Sadly, someone took a shot at him just beforehand so he sent us a message instead, acclaiming our ‘can-do’ spirit.
Our final exhibition, in Vancouver, was completed on schedule and we followed the coastline north to the mouth of the Yukon River in Alaska.
If the ship had been able to continue north through the Bering Strait – betw
een Russia’s eastern tip and Alaska – she would have sailed on to the North Pole, over the top and back to England via Spitsbergen. But because the Arctic Ocean is full of moving ice the best the Benjamin Bowring could do was to drop Charlie and me overboard with two 12-foot long rubber boats in the Bering Strait, as close as she could get to the mouth of the Yukon.
Eight years earlier we had scheduled our arrival off the Yukon for the first week of June because, in a bad year, that is the latest time when the northern rivers shed their load of ice and become navigable. All being well we would now ascend the Yukon for 1,000 miles, then descend the Mackenzie River to its mouth in the Arctic Ocean at the Inuit settlement of Tuktoyaktuk. From there we would make a 3,000-mile dash east through the fabled North-West Passage and north up the Canadian archipelago to Ellesmere Island and Alert, our old stamping-ground. It was imperative to complete the entire boat journey from the Bering Strait to Alert within the three short summer months when the Arctic Ocean ice-pack should be at its loosest. We had to reach Alert by the end of September or risk being cut off by freezing seas and twenty-four-hour darkness.
Fewer than a dozen expeditions had ever successfully navigated this passage in either direction. Those few all used boats with protection from the elements and took an average of three years to get through, due to blockage by pack-ice en route.
The Benjamin Bowring’s skipper tried hard to close with the Yukon mouth but, when still fourteen miles away in heavy seas, the echo sounder showed only six to eight feet clearance below the hull, with a ten-knot offshore wind making the ship’s position highly risky.
Our two twelve-foot dinghies slammed up and down in the lee of the ship as we loaded them. Bryn Campbell of The Observer was to accompany Charlie and me as far as Tuktoyaktuk and he clambered atop the fuel drums on Charlie’s madly tossing boat. I experienced a sudden flashback to the very first day of that other Canadian boat journey, ten years before, when Bryn had come within an ace of drowning. Bryn’s diary on leaving the Benjamin Bowring:
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 10
