CHAPTER 5
When Ed reached the top of Everest, his career as a mountaineer could be said to have peaked. There were still many more unscaled mountains to climb, alpine challenges that men had been dreaming about for years—some reputed to be even more difficult than Everest. But several circumstances would keep Ed from another success like Everest.
His health was a major factor—that apparently superhuman constitution was not invulnerable after all. The outcome of his first post-Everest mountaineering challenge was a portent of things to come. In 1954, having gained permission from the Nepalese Government, the New Zealand Alpine Club chose Ed—and who else could they possibly have chosen?—to lead a Himalayan expedition into the Barun Valley. Among its peaks were two that would loom large in Ed’s story in years to come: the unclimbed Makalu and Ama Dablam. Members of the expedition included Everest veterans Charles Evans and George Lowe, as well as Norm Hardie, Bill Beaven and others. Among the Sherpas was Mingma Tsering, whose life would become closely connected with Ed’s until Tsering’s death in 1993.
Having set up base camp, Ed sent two groups off on surveying sorties while he, along with Jim McFarlane and Brian Wilkins, headed off to explore the Barun Glacier. Ed returned after three days of the planned four-day trip, while McFarlane and Wilkins pressed on.
As the hour when they were due to return came and went, and then more time passed, Ed was beginning to worry. Finally, an exhausted Wilkins came into view. He and McFarlane had fallen into a crevasse; Wilkins had managed to extricate himself but McFarlane was injured and was still trapped there.
Ed returned to the site with some Sherpas. He tied a rope around his chest and had himself lowered to the injured man. But the chest was the wrong place to take such weight and, although he didn’t realise it at the time, he cracked three ribs. Numerous attempts to lift McFarlane out failed, and it was all Ed could do to get himself out.
It was clear McFarlane couldn’t be removed that night, so sleeping bags were thrown down to him. Although he told his would-be rescuers he had got into the bags, he had merely wrapped them around himself and would pay the price later with the loss of parts of his feet and fingers to frostbite.
Eventually McFarlane was brought to safety, but this wasn’t to be the end of the expedition. A party set out to attempt Makalu, leaving the injured Ed behind. But his restlessness proved his undoing and, although in pain, he set off to join the party.
Before long his injuries got the better of him: in addition to his broken ribs, he suffered a recurrence of the malaria he had contracted during the war. He began to hallucinate—and he in turn had to be carried out. George Lowe worried Ed might die, and John Hunt was asked to write an obituary—just in case.
Norm Hardie is scathing in his assessment of what happened. ‘There were lots of mountain technical mistakes and leadership omissions . . . His lack of language to explain to Sherpas on the surface what was to be done. Taking all his big weight on just a chest loop was forcing big stress on his body and making it difficult to extract himself at the top of the crevasse lip. Not going down the full length of rope, and then removing his crampons and putting McFarlane into his sleeping bag. Among mountaineers there was dismay to learn that the man who had climbed Everest was so lacking in mountain skills.’
On the other hand, McFarlane, who was the person with most reason to be critical, bore the expedition leader no ill will in later years: ‘I feel privileged to have known him,’ he told Pat Booth.
After the Barun Valley expedition, Ed slowed down; he even went back to helping Rex with the beekeeping. There was still time for the occasional mountain, though. With Harry Ayres, he made the first successful attempt of Mt Magellan in the South Island in 1955.
Ed had got into the habit of adventure. It kept at bay a tendency to melancholia that Louise recognised was never far from the surface and that would erupt if Ed didn’t have something exciting to do.
His next adventure would occupy him for the next couple of years, and preoccupy him for a lot longer. The 1955–58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE) is still the most controversial exploit in Ed’s career.
The Antarctic had irresistible appeal for Ed. Ernest Shackleton and the other early explorers in the region had been among his greatest childhood heroes. At the time of the TAE, Shackleton had been dead just over 30 years. But perhaps the great age of polar exploration was not over. Perhaps it just needed a kick along.
British geologist Dr Vivian Fuchs was planning to cross the Antarctic from the Weddell Sea, with two objectives in mind. The primary aim—serious and scientific—was to conduct a geological survey to find out, in layman’s terms, what was under the ice. Along the way, he would be the first person to cross the great southern continent on land: the British press called it the ‘last great journey in the world’.
To achieve his goal, Fuchs needed many things—not least, money. The name of the conqueror of Everest would definitely help with that. He would also need supplies dropped at certain points so his party would have enough fuel and food to get them through. Ed could come in handy there too.
The plan was for a British base—called Shackleton Base—to be established first, on the Weddell Sea. A New Zealand base—Scott Base—would then be established on the Ross Sea on the other side of Antarctica. Fuchs and company would set off from Shackleton Base; and Ed and the New Zealand support party would set out from Scott Base and travel roughly halfway to the South Pole, leaving supplies in depots that they would establish along the way.
As we know, Ed liked to be first, and the expedition as proposed didn’t seem to offer much scope for firsts. But no one had reached the South Pole by land since Scott in 1912, and he would be heading that way. Also, no one had ever got there by vehicle. Ed held out hope for some time that there would be a separate New Zealand expedition, which, naturally, he would lead; and he kept his options open. But his hopes came to nothing and he eventually accepted the ‘junior’ role and became deputy leader of the TAE.
He did his bit back home, barnstorming the country, addressing fundraising meetings and cajoling donations from schoolchildren and others. The public could even buy ‘shares’ in the expedition, in the form of garish certificates.
Fuchs invited Ed to accompany him on the trip to set up the British base so that Ed could get some Antarctic experience. But the expedition got off to a near-disastrous start on the Weddell Sea side in 1955. Fuchs made a bad call in deciding what route to follow. When the captain of their ship, the Theron, questioned the choice, Fuchs overrode him. As a result, the Theron was nearly iced in. Only the superlative flying of New Zealand Wing Commander John Claydon, who managed a daring take-off from the ice and found an escape route for the Theron from the air, allowed the team to find a way out.
Because of poor planning, much of the team’s gear was flooded; and when the Theron was finally able to get out, after being delayed for a month, it had to do so in such a hurry that the hut being built for the men who were to remain behind over the winter was not finished. This meant the men spent the coldest Antarctic months in a packing crate by day, and sleeping in tents by night.
Ed was aghast. Summing up the near-disaster on the Theron, he said it had given him as much experience in negotiating pack ice as he would ever be likely to need. In Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, after having described in excruciating detail Fuchs’s series of blunders, Ed concluded drily by expressing admiration for his leader’s continued belief in his own decision-making skills.
As for Fuchs’s attitude to Ed, from the very start the Englishman had shown the lofty contempt that would permanently sour relations between the two men. He seemed to grasp every opportunity to patronise Ed. As far as Dr Fuchs was concerned, Sir Edmund was the junior partner—a glorified grocery boy in charge of some deliveries.
A key difference between the two, as Ed had noted, was that Fuchs was a man who stuck with his plan, come ice or high water. Ed was also a meticulous planner, but he could change his plan in an instant if he saw that the circumstances required it.
Fuchs went so far as to exclude Ed—his deputy leader—from planning meetings, telling him he was just along as an observer. Ed was even shut out of social occasions. When the captain of the Royal Navy vessel the Protector, which was in the vicinity and kept in contact with the Theron, invited Fuchs to bring a group on board for dinner, the scientist excluded Ed. When an invitation was extended to the rest of the team to come over for a drink, the captain was mortified to encounter the Conqueror of Everest and to realise he hadn’t been included in the first party.
‘I don’t think Fuchs had thought it through properly,’ says Mike Gill now, looking back at Fuchs’s treatment of Ed. ‘If you are dealing with someone as famous as that, with that personality, they just don’t do as they are told.’
Seeing Fuchs botch one decision after another convinced Ed to make his own arrangements. This extended from the gear everyone wore (Fuchs went for a one-size-fits-all approach, while Ed ensured that everything was made to fit the man who would wear it) to the music (Fuchs limited listening time so there wouldn’t be squabbles).
After he returned to New Zealand, to prepare for his part in the expedition Ed took his team to the Tasman Glacier for practice in conditions that were as near-Antarctic as he could find. And he chose his men for characteristically canny—if apparently quixotic—reasons. Faced with a choice of two potential radio officers, for instance, he chose the one who didn’t call him ‘sir’ during his interview—naval captain Peter Mulgrew.
New Zealand’s contribution of items for the expedition was loaded onto the Endeavour, and the contingent set sail in December 1956. Peter Mulgrew’s wife, June, who, along with Louise and Peter, was farewelling the team, described a slight awkwardness when the wharfside band had to keep playing ‘Now is the Hour’ as the tide pushed the boat back to port.
Even before leaving New Zealand, Ed had pondered the possibility of going to the Pole on a frolic of his own. It’s not clear exactly when he made his final decision to travel the extra 800 kilometres past Depot 700—the point 700 miles from Scott Base that had been agreed on as the official finishing point for his supply drop-offs. Fuchs’s high-handedness alone would not have been enough to make up Ed’s mind, but it would have contributed. ‘What started as a calculated whim became a steely master plan,’ in Tom Scott’s words.
‘Ed never did things on the spur of the moment,’ said Ed’s brother Rex. ‘He would have done some planning.’
As had happened on the Theron trip, Fuchs, carrying out his time-consuming and exacting task, started to fall behind almost before he set out. Meanwhile Ed’s party, on the way to establishing Depot 700, managed to explore some previously unknown areas of the continent and do experiments of their own. But Ed was still left with a lot of time on his hands, and he wasn’t of a mind to slow his pace to match Fuchs’s, sluggish progress.
And so began the story of the so-called Race to the Pole—which was never really a race because Fuchs was never actually in it; but, with one explorer approaching the Pole from one direction and another from the other direction, it did have elements of a race about it.
Both parties had air support, and messages were carried back and forth by this means as well as through radio contact, which also kept them in touch with the outside world. As the news filtered through, the newspapers in Britain and New Zealand reacted along patriotic lines: Britain accused Ed of exceeding his brief and grandstanding for personal glory rather than putting the empire first; and labelled Ed the ‘Abominable Showman’. In New Zealand, the general reaction could best be summed up in the idiom ‘Whack-oh the diddle-oh’. It looked like their boy was going to do it again.
In Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Ed records an argument with himself about whether or not to push on that would have done Hamlet proud. In the end, he says, he decided to go because, if he hadn’t, he would have hated himself for it. He went, in other words, because it was there.
Ed has it both ways in the documentary A View from the Top—he says that he discovered ‘later Fuchs wanted to be the first person to bring a vehicle to the South Pole. I wasn’t aware of this, and if I had been maybe we wouldn’t have pushed on. But on the other hand, maybe we would have pushed on.’
His rival, for his part, went to his grave denying any interest in being first to the Pole. ‘It was nothing to do with me who got there first,’ Fuchs said years later, in the same documentary. ‘It wasn’t a race. I’m a man of science. I was interested in science. I wasn’t interested in the glory of getting there first.’
Ed’s son and daughter have their own view of the journey to the Pole. ‘The media made it into a race,’ says Peter. ‘It wasn’t a race. He is just a driven person. He wanted to go to the Pole. Even to this day it is hard to do anything in Antarctica, and back then it was desperately difficult, so if you get an opportunity like that, you know . . .’
‘And I think he got sick of being bossed around,’ says Sarah. ‘They were pretty condescending.’
‘He wouldn’t have liked being bossed, because he always liked to be boss,’ Peter adds.
Ed was clearly setting up his depots and leaving supplies at a speed that would leave him a large comfort zone in which to reach the South Pole long before Fuchs.
A series of messages were sent—misheard, misunderstood or ignored—flying between London, New Zealand and points in Antarctica. Anything suggesting that they slow down was ignored by Ed, albeit with an appearance of giving due consideration, before he went ahead and did what he was always going to do.
Eventually Ed had the last word: ‘I am hell-bent for the South Pole—God willing and crevasses permitting.’
John Claydon was flying regularly between the New Zealand support party and Scott Base, supporting Ed himself with reconnaissance from the air and delivering fuel supplies. He was one of the first to be let in on the semi-secret. ‘John, I want to tell you something confidentially,’ said Ed. ‘I am planning to head to the Pole. Do you have enough aviation fuel to fly in extra supplies to further depots?’
More fuel would be needed than originally planned, in order to get Ed to the Pole and leave enough to supply the Fuchs party.
‘Hell, no!’ was Claydon’s response. But when he got back to Scott Base, he asked British oil company and expedition sponsor, BP, to supply an extra 20 drums of the fuel they had formulated especially for the conditions.
And he approached US Rear Admiral George Dufek, stationed with the American Antarctic program at McMurdo Sound, who agreed to transport the fuel on a US ship. The drums were sent as deck cargo, but they came loose and ended up going overboard.
Claydon, who was also flying in telegrams telling Ed to slow down, found himself in a tangled web, and so he rang Dufek: ‘Look, that fuel you sent—it all went overboard.’
‘Well, John, what are you going to do now?’
‘Well, it’s a hell of a situation and I hate to say it—what’s the chance of flying it down?’
‘John, that’s a pretty tall order isn’t it?’
A week later Claydon got a message from air headquarters asking why he had made a personal request to BP. His report must have been adequate, as he heard no more about it. And thanks to Dufek’s cooperation, another 20 drums were flown in. Without Claydon’s initiative, Ed wouldn’t have got to the Pole.
Not everyone in Ed’s group wanted to continue past Depot 700—the agreed-upon finishing point, after which they were supposed to return to Scott Base. Only Mulgrew was particularly keen. Engineer Murray Ellis was most reluctant, but Ed was insistent—he had to be, as he could not afford to go without the engineer. They faced off and Ellis ultimately backed down.
Some say Ed bullied his men into it. Others that he cajoled them. Whichever explanation you accept, there is no denying that not all of them wanted to go, but they went.
Team member and fellow New Zealander, Jim Bates, wasn’t worried about upsetting the expedition organisers—he was worried about dying. Ed wanted to go in a straight line. ‘It was too dangerous,’ Bates told the NZ Sunday Star-Times in 2000. ‘There were crevasses everywhere. It made us uptight. We put our foot down and said “We go west”. If Ed had disagreed, that would have been it. We would have gone back. After that we got on well as a team.
‘There was quite a bit of friction and tension. Conditions were far from safe. It got to the point that it was something like the Mutiny on the Bounty. We told Ed that unless we were all involved in the decision-making we would turn back. We would have too. He was hurt. No doubt about that. But he had no choice.’
John Claydon wasn’t surprised that Ed got his way. ‘It was that determination that took him to Everest,’ he says. ‘No question about it. He wasn’t a normal person in that respect. If he had made up his mind to do a thing, he would do it and nobody could do a thing about it.’
Claydon also observes that Ed’s failure to be selected for pilot training and subsequent training in navigation in the air force was a factor in his success at the Pole.
‘On the Polar Plateau you are in the wilderness,’ says Claydon. ‘There are no landmarks, but he was able to navigate. He may have brushed up on his astronomical navigation before he went south. You see, down there in the wilderness you don’t even know where south is. If you are in the wilderness like the Polar Plateau and there is nothing to see anywhere, where would you go? You can only do that by taking sun shots and you have to use navigation tables and all the rest of it. I have copies of his plans of the route he did. It is a very complicated business. So if he had become a pilot and had lived to tell the tale, he wouldn’t have learnt the navigational skills to get to the South Pole.’
The party was riding on tractors, which progressed in single file, roped together so that if one fell into a crevasse the others would provide an anchor. The group rotated the risky task of being lead tractor driver—that is, first into the crevasse—among themselves.
The tractors are a big part of this story. Ed used them not just to get to the Pole, but to develop his technique of playing down his achievements in order to highlight them. That the journey was made on Massey Ferguson tractors is repeatedly mentioned in all accounts. The impression given is that on the way to Antarctica he stopped off at the farm and picked up a couple of tractors from the shed. In truth, he had visited Massey Ferguson’s British headquarters and researched the vehicles and their capabilities thoroughly before setting out.
Doug McKenzie, the official press correspondent travelling with the party, had originally been keen on continuing; but then he began to have doubts and opted to fly back to Scott Base. There he encountered others with doubts about Ed’s plan, including one anonymous team member who said, ‘There are three expeditions going on here. There’s the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the New Zealand Antarctic Expedition, and Hillary’s private fucking expedition to the Pole.’
McKenzie’s unusually harsh assessment of Ed, no doubt formulated in the midst of an icy wasteland, was expanded upon in his book Opposite Poles (1963): ‘Hillary was principally concerned about Hillary. Behind his easy-going manner he held that threat of ruthlessness which must be possessed in some degree by all successful leaders. With a casualness which was startling to those who met it, he was willing to place members of his party temporarily on the sideline if this became necessary for his major purpose.’
Ed remained oblivious to any whispers of the controversy raging back home and beyond. New Zealand Prime Minister Walter Nash commissioned a report on whether or not he should intervene: he was told there were insufficient grounds, and that such a move would be most unpopular with the voters.
Ed reached the Pole on 4 January 1958, with little fuel to spare, but fifteen days ahead of his expedition leader. The news of Ed’s arrival was heralded laconically in the Auckland Star, which managed to include a backhanded swipe at Fuchs:
Hillary scores his second triumph
NZ Party reaches Pole;
Dr Fuchs expected there tomorrow.
Back in London, Buckingham Palace got in touch with the TAE committee. It appeared the Queen had heard the news and wanted to know what might be appropriate. Should she make some acknowledgement or send congratulations to her knight?
‘Under no circumstances,’ came the thunderous reply.
Ed and his party were flown back to Scott Base, where they awaited Fuchs’s eventual arrival at the Pole. At that point, Ed was flown back so as to guide them for the rest of the return journey—not unlike a father having to go out late at night to retrieve an errant teenager.
There are still people who are violently exercised by Ed’s decision to go to the Pole—and his success. The key complaint seems to be insubordination. Fuchs was the boss. Ed had a job to do and should have stopped when he had done it, rather than exceed his job description.
But while he may have resorted to some subterfuge in planning his scheme, and some aggressive leadership in persuading his men to carry it out, Ed did not interfere with Fuchs’s plans. Fuchs completed his geological survey and became the first person to cross the Antarctic continent on land. If that achievement has been overshadowed by Ed’s, then that is because Ed casts a longer shadow.
Pat Booth describes this assessment as ‘very tolerant. I wonder what Ed’s attitude would have been if he had been aiming to scale Everest from the south face and there had been a team put in to make supply dumps and one had gone on to make the ascent. He would not have been amused.’
Official footage shows the two explorers greeting each other with the most cordial of handshakes. In fact, Fuchs could not afford to be seen to resent Ed: only by holding himself in check could he hope to silence, or at least mute, any of the many legitimate criticisms of Fuchs’s performance that Ed could make.
Ed delighted in telling the story of how, as the party now made its way to Scott Base, Fuchs forced him to sit in the back, where cold and boredom were his companions. Every so often, however, the party would stop and Ed would have to be let out so he could look around and tell them in which direction they should be going.
Somehow Ed and Fuchs managed to coauthor a book on the expedition, from their very different perspectives. But Ed was personally stung by the criticism that came his way. Over the years he would reveal an abundant ability to dish it out, but less of a knack for taking it.
‘I tried to infer it didn’t affect me,’ he said. ‘It did. I didn’t like all the hullabaloo. It was the first time I’d struck unfavourable publicity about something of this nature. On my return I went to ground for quite a while. It was the last time I did any beekeeping.’
Significantly, he was not invited to celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the expedition—although he was invited to the twenty-fifth and the fiftieth anniversaries. And Fuchs managed to find one final way to annoy Ed, who was, if not quite a prude, conservative in his attitudes to personal relationships. When the two men went on a speaking tour of South Africa together, Fuchs was accompanied by a woman when he greeted Ed: ‘Ed, you’ve met my wife?’
Indeed he had, but this wasn’t her. Ed knew full well that the woman he was greeting was Fuchs’s former secretary. Ed’s sense of honour precluded pretending that people were who they were not, but for once he went with Fuchs’s plan and played along.
‘I was a bit annoyed actually,’ he later told Tom Scott.