History
You want ice with that?
by Denis Welch
IT WAS ALL MEANT TO HAPPEN in a decorous, gentlemanly, oh-so-English way. The Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1957 had been planned as follows. The main British party of 12, under the leadership of Dr Vivian Fuchs, was to make the first crossing of Antarctica, traversing the continent from Shackleton Base, south of South America, to the South Pole and on to Scott Base. As they could not carry enough supplies for the whole crossing, a smaller New Zealand party under the leadership of Sir Edmund Hillary was to go out from Scott Base and lay in stores at depots – the last one, Depot 700, 800km from the Pole – thus enabling Fuchs and his men to cover the homeward leg safely.
As New Zealanders will never forget, it didn’t quite work out like that. Fuchs’s party, delayed from the outset, was running several weeks late with his Sno-Cats by the time the depot-laying was done, so Hillary decided to push on for the Pole – “God willing and crevasses permitting” – and meet Fuchs there. Churning across the ice on their three trusty Ferguson tractors, Sir Ed and his team of four (including a National Film Unit cameraman) reached the Pole on the afternoon of January 4, 1958, with just one drum of fuel left.
Kiwis rejoiced: not only was it the first motorised expedition to reach the South Pole but the first overland expedition of any kind since Captain Scott’s in 1912. Some British noses got sniffy, however: the glory supposedly reserved for Fuchs had been snatched by a pushy New Zealander. Hillary’s action, wrote the London correspondent for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, was a “deplorable breach of discipline … distasteful elements of drama and personal glory are being introduced into what is primarily a scientific enterprise”.
Fuchs himself, however, seemed to take it in good part: he and Sir Ed greeted each other warmly when the Brits finally reached the Pole on January 20, though Hillary, suffering from mild carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty tractor exhaust, had flown back to Scott Base in the meantime. Fuchs eventually reached Scott Base on March 2, having covered a phenomenal 3600km of ice and snow in 99 days, and was promptly knighted by the Queen. His nickname was Bunny. He died in 1999.
Sources: Hellbent for the Pole, by Geoffrey Lee Martin (Random House, $44.99); Call of the Ice: Fifty Years of New Zealand in Antarctica, by David L Harrowfield (David Bateman, $59.99 hardback, $49.99 paperback).
