Hell-bent on a bold race for the pole

On an Antarctic supply flight in 1957, Ed Hillary had a secret. He pulled aside his chief pilot, Wing Commander John Claydon. "John, I want to talk to you," he said, above the noise of the Beaver aircraft engine that had to be kept running in the frigid air at the landing spot on the polar plateau.

"I'm telling you in confidence that I want to press on to the pole.

"Have you got sufficient aviation fuel to fly in the necessary fuel for me?"

The answer was no.

"I hadn't because this was never planned for," Mr Claydon, 90, told The Dominion Post from his Christchurch home in a recent interview.

A special blended fuel was needed that excluded any moisture that could form ice crystals and cause a blockage. It was simply not practical to use American fuel, as Sir Ed suggested.

And Mr Claydon felt obligated to the British oil company BP which was the official sponsor of the expedition.

Sir Ed was leader of the pioneering party that built Scott Base on Ross Island and was also charged with supporting the expedition by Briton (later Sir) Vivian Fuchs, who was attempting to be the first man to cross the Antarctic overland.

Using Ferguson tractors adapted with typical Ed ingenuity to cross the snow and ice on tracks, it was the New Zealand party's role to proceed toward the South Pole from the Ross Sea and lay supplies for Fuchs' party advancing from Shackleton base in the west.

Mr Claydon knew Sir Ed well enough not to be surprised at the radical change in tactics.

"Of course he hadn't told the members of his team about this," he said.

"It was the sort of thing he would want to do. Kiwis want to do things a little bit differently, I guess."

 

Though answerable to the Royal New Zealand Air Force, rather than directly to Sir Ed, the equally independent Mr Claydon kept his counsel.

"I felt I had sufficient authority to make my own decisions. It's not the sort of thing you could discuss with headquarters because they are not in the picture."

He contacted BP requesting an additional 800 gallons of fuel - 40 drums each of 20 gallons.

This was blended over 24 hours and Mr Claydon approached the affable Admiral George Dufek, head of America's adjacent McMurdo base, who agreed to transport the fuel on the icebreaker Glacier.

The drums were carried as deck cargo but broke loose in a severe storm and as they were sliding around the deck they had to be tossed overboard.

"I went over the hill [to McMurdo], told Dufek what had happened, took a deep breath and said, `What's the chance of flying it down?'

"He said, `Well, that's a pretty tall order, John, but you leave it with me'."

The BP chemists went back to work, the Americans flew the fuel in free of charge on a Globemaster and the fuel situation was taken care of.

"Whether I told [Dufek] Ed was going to the pole I'm not too sure.

"Nobody else knew the plan.

"I felt a bit sorry for the guys with Ed, I thought they were good chaps, but that was none of my business."

As far as Fuchs and his party, the British and New Zealand governments, the general public who were avidly following the great adventure to the south in mysterious Antarctica and the Kiwi party at Scott Base were concerned, Sir Ed was going only as far as depot 700.

This was 700 miles (1100 kilometres) from Scott Base and still 500 miles short of the South Pole.

Fuchs' party, taking seismic soundings and collecting ice cores along the way, made slow progress and Sir Ed became more determined.

When he finally revealed his plan, there was some dismay.

Engineer Jim Bates, who had designed honey-extracting equipment for Sir Ed's beekeeping business, was employed to look after the diesel generators and all the equipment back at base.

He was terrified of crevasses and never envisaged a polar dash.

"There was quite a discussion the following day," Mr Claydon said.

"Prior to that Ed said, `If you blokes don't come, I'm quite sure Peter Mulgrew [expedition member and climbing companion who later died in the Mt Erebus crash] will join and we'll go on by ourselves'.

"That was a foolish comment because they just couldn't have done it."

Mr Claydon said he just kept flying loads into the interior.

"I didn't really get into any discussion. It was obviously a delicate subject."

When the survivors of the 22-strong party of scientists, pilots, dog handlers, engineers, radio operators, cooks and support staff had a reunion on the ice in 2000, there were still mixed feelings about their leader.

"Lots of times we didn't know what we were doing and why we were doing it," Mr Bates said at a dinner in the original mess hut at the base.

"With what I know now, I wouldn't have applied [for the expedition]."

SIR ED was well aware that Mr Bates and fellow engineer Murray Ellis lacked enthusiasm for the unexpected change in plans. "I wasn't greatly concerned with this," Sir Ed wrote in his subsequent book No Latitude for Error.

"Looking on the gloomy side of life can almost be regarded as an occupational hazard with vehicle mechanics in the Antarctic."

But Sir Ed's immense force of will carried all before him and after severe cold and hardship - bare hands could be exposed for only 15 seconds when doing repairs - the New Zealand party drove their three tractors up to the US base at the South Pole 16 days before Fuchs' arrival.

They watched a cowboy film at the base cinema that evening while the Fuchs party laboured on from the Weddell Sea side of the continent.

"It captivated the country and it took the wind out of the sails of the British," Mr Claydon remembers with a chuckle.

"It was never intended to be a race.

"He knew it. I knew it. But it's not the sort of thing you ever talked about."

At one stage Sir Ed was instructed by telegram by the government's Ross Sea Committee in Wellington not to proceed beyond depot 700. A later message said there would be no objection if Fuchs agreed.

Sir Ed subsequently wrote: "If an explorer in the field always waited for permission from his committee at home then nothing would get done or it would be done too late."

Prime Minister Walter Nash approved.

"Nothing can give me greater pleasure than to convey the delighted congratulations of all New Zealanders to Sir Edmund Hillary and his small but very gallant team," he told the country.

 

Shackleton and Scott, the heroic pioneers of polar exploration, had no love for each other and refused to speak.

There was obvious potential for a similar attitude nearly 50 years later but if Fuchs felt slighted by Sir Ed's one-upmanship he was too gracious to show it.

When he did learn Sir Ed was heading to the pole, on what he described as a "jaunt", Fuchs wrote in his diary: "While there is no objection to his going to the pole, there is also no value for he can do no work on the way."

On a return to Scott Base in 2004 - he made his last visit last year on the 50th anniversary of the base's founding - Sir Ed told The Dominion Post that had he stuck to the original plan he would have had to wait for possibly a month for the Fuchs party to arrive. "I simply wasn't prepared to do that."

On Boxing Day, 1957, he radioed Scott Base: "We are heading hell-bent for the pole, God willing and crevasses permitting."

The conquerer of Everest thus became only the third man to travel overland to the pole, after Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912.

A cook at the base summed it up: "Old Ed, eh. He stiffed the Brits twice."

 

Dominion Post editor Tim Pankhurst travelled to Antarctica with the Scott Base reunion party in 2000 and again with Sir Ed in 2004.

 

- © Fairfax NZ News