Hillary’s Dash For Pole Embarrasing

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30045, 1 February 1963, Page 10

Hillary’s Dash For Pole Embarrasing

(NZ.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright)

LONDON, Jan, 30. The difference in personalities of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sir Vivian Fuchs makes an interesting character study in a book by Douglas McKenzie shortly to be published in London and entitled “Opposite Foies.”

Mr McKenzie, a Christchurch journalist, was a correspondent for the New Zealand Press Association and “The Times’’ for the New Zealand Antarctic Expeditton in 1957-58.

He gives a highly readable description of life in the Antarctic and discusses Sir Edmund Hillary’s controversial dash for the South Pole from depot 700. Hillary arrived there well ahead of Sir Vivian Fuchs who was making a transAntarctic crossing and therefore incurred displeasure in London and Wellington. “Hillary,” says Mr McKenzie, “was principally concerned about Hillary. Behind his easy going manner he held tha thread of ruthlessness which must be possessed in some degree by all successful leaders. Two Different Ages

“Lack of a truly commonground between Hillary and Fuchs followed from the circumstances that they were really men from two different ages of Antarctica. The first two ages of Antarctica —the age of discovery of the nineteenth century and the heroic age of the first part of the twentieth century—had already passed away. Both qualified for the new ages of the southern continent according to their differing temperaments and skills. Sir Edmund Hillary saw himself as part of the age of exploration. Sir Vivian Fuchs as part of the scientific age

“Both were me’em ages and both still overlap to some extent although exploration for its own sake—journeys of the kind which took Hillary to the Pole—is now as out-

dated as coal fuel in Antarctica.

“Hillary's activities in Antarctica were in the tradition of Byrd. Fuchs’ were in the new tradition which has brought the Antarctic continent to be a vast scientific laboratory.”

In a chapter headed, “Inquest,” Mr McKenzie contrasts the hero's welcome Sir Vivian Fuchs received with that received by Sir Edmund Hillary in his own country which was “no more genial than the warmth inevitably reflected from his initial proximity to Fuchs.” For “Hillary bad tost, and in doing so had embarrassed the Ross Sea Committee.” “He had embarrassed New Zealand officialdom and he had embarrassed the Government—and there is nobody in New Zealand more easily chilled by United Kingdom disapproval. “Sir Edmund Percival Hillary had been a bad boy and in New Zealand the business of quietly dropping him was pressed forward with sufficient delicacy that perhaps it might not be unduly noticed.”