Rescue airlift cannot dim South Pole epic

Press, 18 January 1986, Page 19

Rescue airlift cannot dim South Pole epic

By

KEN COATES

‘The thought of all those who supported us, young and old, kept me going’

Sheer British grit is far from dead. The sinking of the Footsteps of Scott expedition’s ship at the crucial moment of success in reaching the South Pole on foot, and the swift American rescue airlifts that followed, has overshadowed a remarkable achievement of physical effort and endurance.

It is too easy to dismiss three men hauling sledges across hundreds of miles of ice in sub-zero temperatures as a bunch of amateurs — especially from the insulated warmth of modern aircraft and polar stations. The expedition’s aims did have a faintly archaic ring, as if the British were seeking to recapture the days of heroes, exploration, and new frontiers.

“We hope,” they said before setting out, “to retrace Captain Robert Scott’s footsteps to the South Pole to restore the feelings of adventure, isolation, and commitment that have been lost through the employment of the paraphernalia of modem times.”

Their resolve was that without recourse to depots, dogs, air support, or outside assistance of any kind, three men alone would manhaul sledges 1412 kilometres to the pole. Robert Swan, aged 28, expedition leader, in an interview in the shadow’s of Christchurch’s statue of Captain Scott, gave an insight into how this ideal was translated into a practical reality, and how the trekkers survived to tell the tale.

Surprisingly, he admitted that while he had the qualities to organise the private expedition to the South Pole, and this took seven years, one of the first discoveries he made at the start of the long trudge was that he could not walk in a straight line.

It became clear that the real leader on the hazardous journey over the icy continent was a fellow polar walker, Roger Mear, aged 35, one of Britain’s most successful mountaineers.

He was the group’s reliable navigator. He used little more than the same equipment of Scott and Shackleton — a small silver compass that could be bought in Britain for the equivalent of about 520 and a wheel to measure distance.

Mear led the trekkers unerringly across the great ice barrier of the Ross shelf, about the size of France, sighting the right mountains looming up at the entrance to the Beardmore Glacier.

It was then up the glacier, travelling hard and fast with Swan lagging from tom and stretched knee ligaments, and then across the polar plateau right on target for the south geographic pole and the permanently manned scientific station there.

Third man in the party was Gareth Wood, aged 33, who has stayed behind for another winter to clean up the Cape Evans base camp site. He is an Outward Bound instructor. Robert Swan described himself as a dynamic person who takes things hard and fast, something he found he could not do on the ice. “I had to concentrate on nine hours of walking, getting the tent up, eating, and sleeping. I also had to get it right in the head, and this meant preparation over the winter period, without which we could not have done it.”

Both Swan and Mear had pored carefully over the diaries of Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Swan says he was excited when they left on the same day as Scott, November 3. But although the symbolism of Scott’s ill-fated journey inspired them all, he felt it had to be controlled. “Being an historian, I did not want it to be a dominating influence.” It was Roger Mear who masterminded how the polar walkers would undertake the journey. He says that Scott tried to maintain a definite average distance, while he decided to aim at nine hours of marching in three stages with half an hour’s rest in between each.

“Mileage each day fluctuated but the amount of effort put out was constant,” he adds.

Wearing obviously self-patched weather-proof trousers and sporting a frost-bitten nose, Swan reflected on the 70-day grind. “Three hours is almost a marathon time,” he says, “and we had three stretches each day.” They pushed ahead using skis wherever possible, fitting skins where the going was tough.

The worst surfaces were on the Ross ice shelf where they had to crash their sledges over sastrugi—frozen snow ridges formed by the wind that can loom two metres high.

“The Eskimos have 400 words in their vocabulary for snow surfaces which can change daily,” says Swan. “We once had 53 miles of

continuous sastrugi but good surfaces also.

“But we kept a straight course and, after 400 miles, Roger navigated bang on the gap to the Beardmore Glacier — an extraordinary feat.” After each three-hour leg, the trekkers would halt for half an hour, drinking draughts of hot instant soup carried in three flasks. They covered from 17.5 km to 29 km daily with a best day of 32 km. On four days they sheltered all day inside their tent and blizzards cut short their treks on several other days. “It was the thought of all those school children at home, and the people, old and young, who supported us and believed we would get there, that kept me going,” says Swan. The leader admits to avoiding lighting the stove — the other two men were better at it. So, in view of the danger of fire, he always left it to them.

Swan reveals the fierce loyalty the trio built up to each other. The male stereotype in the extreme — tough, hard, and capable of driving himself relentlessly — he speaks of the “love and respect” for each other, a commitment in which no man could let the other down.

Mear says that living in such close proximity to two others was like having two mirrors next to you in sleeping bags — each reflecting your emotions. But they never came to blows.

The leader under-stated the effort he made when he stretched knee tendons using crampons up the Beardmore Glacier. “We weren’t going to stop,” he says. He slogged extra hours lugging his sledge over rough terrain to catch up, and the trio traversed the glacier in nine days. “This was when the expedition really came together,” Swan adds.

The polar trek was due as much to modern technology as to grit and determination. Nutritionists helped the expedition work out precise requirements and the trio took rations weighing less than a kilogram but providing 5200 calories.

Swan says they did not get sick of eating their dried bacon bars, biscuits, and dried egg and butter mixture.

“Our menu sounds terrible now, but all we wanted to do was eat it when we stopped at nights.

“Scott and Shackleton suffered extreme hunger and although we worked as hard as they did, we did not suffer in this way. This is what 75 years of technology does.” All three lost considerable weight. “With the sort of effort we were called on to make, the body just did not need the extra,” says Swan. Although Scott reported much trouble with crevasses, the Footsteps party had none. Swan put this down to “Roger Mear’s sixth sense.” Special sleeping bags were developed for the trekkers, vastly superior to the bags used by Scott in which ice formed. The modern bags were essentially two-goose down in the inner bag, protected by a synthetic less affected by moisture on the outer. A vapour layer inside the sleeping bag prevented moisture from the body entering the insulation. The arrival of the three men

hauling their sledges at the South Pole is now history ... So is the strongly expressed view that the Antarctic is no place for enthusiastic amateurs. Even in London, which the expedition left on November 3, 1984, there was a feeling that the amateurs had intruded into a world now ruled by professionals, a world in which they had no place. Maybe Giles Kershaw, the expedition’s pilot, is right in saying it is no good trying to squash the genuine spirit of adventure that still exists in the world. The spirit of the expedition seemed to be summed up in an exchange between an admiring Christchurch woman who had dismounted from her bicycle to tell Robert Swann how great he was. “Why did you do it?” she asked. Swan looked bewildered.“ Maybe we’re a bit strange, I don’t know? We just did it.”