BOOKS

The longest journey

James Buchan

Of all those who have explored Antarctica, said the skipper of the Nimrod as he watched Shackleton and two compan- ions trudging over the ice of McMurdo Sound in early 1908, `few have done so more uncomfortably or with greater hard- ship than the British'.

The great tradition of British Antarctic misery — the blue-jackets manhauling laden sleds through flurries of driven snow and Edwardian self-sacrifice, the contempt for dogs, the diffidence on ski — was very much alive at the turn of this year when Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Dr Mike Stroud completed their great unsupported crossing of the continent.

Of this journey, perhaps the most appalling polar adventure ever not to end in fatality, both men have written personal accounts, though one wonders sometimes if they're talking about the same trip. New- comers to the literature of polar travel will be surprised that these men dwell, not on the sublimity of the Antarctic landscape or their reasons for doing what they did, but On certain questions of competition. How much extra weight did Mike have on his sled? Who pulled and who trailed? How long did Mike have both of the functioning ski-sticks on the Beardmore and Ran none? And who was deader when they were picked up?

The project to cross the Antarctic continent has its origins in one of the great- est journeys ever made: Shackleton's expedition of 1914-16. In terms of its objective, the expedition was a miserable failure. Shackleton's barquentine, the Endurance, broke up in the ice-pack of the Weddell Sea and his achievement was to bring every single one of his men safely home: with five companions, he crossed 800 miles of the world's roughest seas in an open boat to bring help from South Georgia.

For two generations, the Antarctic Con- tinent was left alone. The crossing was eventually done by Fuchs and Hillary in the 1957-58 season; by Fiennes and others in 1980-81; by a large group led by Will Steger in 1990-91; and by Reinhold Messner and Arved Fuchs the same season. But all these expeditions were resupplied by aircraft or had some form of mechanical or other assistance, ranging from snow- tractors to dogs, and thus lacked the pure antiquarian rigour which modern explorers (who have nothing to explore, but history and themselves) require. The idea of an unsupported crossing occurred to Fiennes and, simultaneously, to the Norwegian lawyer Erling Kagge. This echo of the original rivalry between Scott and Amund-

sen, between British doggedness and Norwegian élan, added interest to the pro- ject, though Kagge was eventually to settle for a solo walk only to the Pole. For all the derision heaped on Scott in, for example, Roland Huntford's biography, there is actually nothing wrong with man- hauling in itself, as Fiennes makes admirably clear. No machine or animal can carry its fuel for 1600 miles of Antarctic ice and snow — and, anyway, dogs are now banned from the continent, along with all exotic species (except, of course, English noblemen and military doctors on fur- lough.) The human body really is the best machine around for travel on the Antarc- tic surface.

The skill is to strike a balance between the fuel in the body, in terms of fat and muscle, and the fuel on the sled — all those freeze-dried rations — so that at the end of your journey your sled is empty and you are just about alive. Since Fiennes and Stroud know about as much about polar travel as anybody, it would be foolish to question their preparation; but they did start with very heavily laden sleds. When they were dropped off on the Filchner Ice Shelf on 9 November, their sleds weighed 485 pounds apiece (including a hay-bale's weight of radio equipment, some of which, according to a technical note by one of their radio operators, Laurence Howell, in Fiennes's book, was useless.) Unable to face the climb onto Berkner Island with such monstrous burdens, they ignored the advice of the great glaciologist Charles Swithinbank — I shudder to repeat this heresy — and followed the ice shelf round the skirts of the island and into a nightmare of crevasses, where Stroud all but lost his life on Day 3. They carried food and cooking gas only for 100 days, which committed them to a very demanding progress of 16 miles a day and left no space for rest days. Even so, the sleds were still too heavy and they jettisoned food and fuel and even their down jackets: Fiennes later suffered agonies of cold on the Beardmore Glacier and Stroud fell prey to near fatal attacks of hypothermia and hypoglycaemia. Finally, to pull such a weight, Fiennes decided that he must use a rigid ski- boot, which caused an old wound in his right foot to ulcerate ,and he was in unremitting pain for nearly 60 days. How he mastered this pain is one of the heroics of this story.

On the trudge to the Pole, their progress was glacially slow and erratic. For much of the time they went sideways, passing back and forth across nearly 20 degrees of longi- tude. That they reached the Pole at all is quite astonishing, even if it was on 15 Jan- uary and 10 days after Kagge* had loped in daisy-fresh roaring for Akavit. That they passed on, averting their eyes from the rel- ative amenities of the US base at the Pole, is a triumph of pure will.

Once past the Pole, the great winds that come tumbling off the polar dome were at their backs and they were able to use up-ski sails. Stroud is clearly happier to talk about sails, which Messner and Fuchs had used to brilliant effect. Fiennes, one suspects, thinks that sails are a bit of a cheat, though he reminds us that the Edwardians used them. The sails did allow them to make some good days and recapture some of the lost time (and expended food and muscle) but at the cost of bad frostbite. Eventually, they reached the top of the Beardmore and began their tumbling descent over blue ice and crevasse fields, in roaring katabatic winds with their sleds constantly running out of control, searching for the pass that Shackleton had found in 1908 and named The Gate. Stroud writes:

The next day, after a few hours' hauling, the air stirred once more. Then our hoods began to rustle as the white crystals kicked up by our skis started to flee before us, The wind became stronger, but it was intermittent and we went on hauling, thinking of the gusts as there to mock us. But they persisted. We opened our sails and were finally carried steadily forward, borne on the wind that for half of our journey had been an enemy and for most of the rest an absent ally. It carried us the extra miles and soon, across the broad- ening frozen delta, we saw the Granite Tow- ers and the entrance to our road. We pressed on, not stopping for our tepid soup. As we drew closer, the Towers became greater, and what had appeared an ordinary broken cliff grew into huge red-granite pillars — a temple made for giants, a gateway to release.

Past the Gate, they left the Antarctic continent. But one of the relics of the Edwardian era, when expeditions were dropped by ship, is the notion that the crossing should be from anchorage to anchorage: that is, from and to the ends of the ice shelves. So they pressed on, though with little chance of reaching the far side of the Ross Ice-Shelf and the cruise ship that was supposed to pick them up on 16 Febru- ary.

From Fiennes' account, one senses that his main problem was not his ulcerated foot or the 50 pounds in weight he'd lost, but money. With a truly Shackletonian flair for flaky commercial ventures, Fiennes had become a Name at Lloyd's in 1989 and was haemorrhaging losses. A rescue off the ice- shelf would have cost him $100,000 unless — and this is the crucial point — the two men were in such lethal condition as to trigger a rescue-insurance policy. After four days' trudging across the shelf, Fiennes decided they were dead enough. And so they gave up, having crossed the terra firma and made the longest unsupported journey ever. They had six days' food and gas left, which was ample time for a De Havilland Twin Otter and its admirable Canadian air-crew to locate them and pick them up. Both accounts are haunted by a sense of failure. But Fiennes believes they would have died if they'd proceeded; and I think he displayed some of the leadership mate- rial that he talked so much about on the trip, much to Stroud's fury. As Shackleton told his wife after his great decision to turn back from the Pole in 1908, 'I thought you would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.'

Some readers will wonder why they per- sisted with this terrible journey. They will find some superficial answers: fame, money, charitable fund-raising and Dr Stroud's medicial research, surely the most expensive undertaken anywhere ever. Fiennes says he was troubled throughout by the fear of growing old and losing his strength, and I suspect that is part of the answer: when you fear something very much, to confront and master it will pro- vide some temporary relief. Until the next time.

What sustained them for much of the journey was competition with Kagge and, to a much greater degree, with each other. Both accounts are full of gleeful descrip- tions of each other's deteriorating condi- tion (Ran very weak, Mike looks terrible etc.) Stroud heads his last chapter 'Also Ran', while Fiennes quotes a hostile psy- chologist's report on Stroud, made eight years earlier at the New Zealand base on Ross Island (which is not exactly Vienna). Amid these puerile squabbles, Fiennes has an important insight. In a long manhaul at high latitudes, the personality will be man- gled badly out of shape; and men (and, more recently, women) confide the most appalling things to their diaries or letters home or instant accounts. We should, therefore, hesitate to condemn Scott sim- ply on the evidence, say, of Captain Oates's letters to his mother. Of the two books, Stroud's is the more elegant. Fiennes' has a peculiar charm for me, because he sometimes quotes my judg- ments on Antarctica, a continent of which I am almost wholly ignorant. I imagine most people will want to own both books.

*Alone .to the South Pole, by Erling Kagge, J. W. Cappelens Forlag, Oslo.