Here’s a strange fact from 20th-century chronology: it took our species until 1958 to mount an expedition that successfully crossed the whole Antarctic continent. Three years later, we were already in space.
The Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1955-58 was a revival of old dreams with new technology. It was huge and cumbersome. When at last it set out from base camp on the edge of the Weddell Sea, it did so in a long convoy of heavy tracked vehicles, shattering the Antarctic silence and pounding across the ice at little more than walking pace. The Sno-Cats leading the way plunged frequently into yawning crevasses. Even when the going was good they managed about a mile to the gallon.
The expedition spanned three Antarctic summers and two interminable winters. Along the way it lost its “Commonwealth” tag and became known simply as the TAE. It was a late hurrah of a great power in eclipse; British-led, supported by New Zealand, entirely successful on its own slightly muddled terms. It was avidly followed by the press and public at the time, and then, inexorably, forgotten.
More than half a century later, the TAE is being remembered. When its official photographer, George Lowe, died last year, he was working on an account of the expedition written for a generation that might be forgiven for thinking that Shackleton was the last great polar explorer. Lowe’s pictures have been published along with his words, many for the first time. They give glimpses of an Antarctica between two eras, long after Scott and Amundsen but before Gore-Tex and flown-in tourists, when men still went there exclusively with men, ate butter in inch-thick slabs, explored for exploring’s sake and occasionally trimmed each other’s whiskers for the camera.
Lowe was not an ice-cap man by training or calling. He wasn’t even a professional photographer. He was a mountaineer, famous in climbing circles for his role in the conquest of Everest. In 1953, he had heaved gear high above the South Col with his good friend Edmund Hillary, and photographed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their descent. When Hillary uttered his triumphant words about knocking the bastard off, they were addressed to Lowe.
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“Some men enjoy going ‘up’,” Lowe writes in The Crossing of Antarctica. “Others choose the hard frozen Antarctic flatness and the conquering of its horizontal hazards. I belonged to the school that generally prefers going ‘up’.” He was persuaded to try the frozen flatness by Vivian “Bunny” Fuchs, a geologist and James Mason lookalike, at what became the British Antarctic Survey. Fuchs dreamt of crossing the continent to finish what Shackleton had started in 1912, to show it could be done and to map and measure the great Antarctic ice sheet. He signed up Lowe as official photographer and “New Zealand liaison officer” – a role that would become surprisingly important.
When the expedition left London in November 1955, it was in a ship laden with four-tracked Sno-Cats, two-tracked Weasels, a couple of disassembled aeroplanes, several prefabricated huts, enough tinned food for a small army, three years’ supply of rum, and dog teams that included four husky puppies from Whipsnade Zoo. To get it all on film, Lowe brought with him two Bell & Howell cine cameras for newsreels and documentaries and a Leica and a Rolleiflex for stills. He brought film in special aluminium cases and developed much of it in situ in a portable dark room.
Polar exploration has since been dominated by purists and pedants fond of arguing among themselves about the relative merits of going it alone or unsupported, with or without dogs, on foot or on skis whisked along by giant kites. There was nothing pure about the TAE. The honour of completing the first full Antarctic crossing was still up for grabs, and Fuchs threw everything he had at it. There would be pre-positioned fuel depots, aerial reconnaissance flights and advance parties to scout the toughest sections of the route. Crucially, there would be a separate supporting expedition starting from New Zealand and approaching the South Pole from the opposite side of Antarctica. The plan was for this expedition to stop 550 miles short of the Pole, wait there for Fuchs’s main party and lead it back to the eventual goal of the Scott Base on the Ross ice shelf. The Kiwis would be led by none other than Edmund – now Sir Edmund – Hillary.
Hillary was by then an international action hero. In the end, inevitably, he was the one who transformed the TAE from dogged struggle against nature into headline news. But first, the struggle – led from the front by Fuchs.
With a government grant of £100,000, scarcely imaginable in today’s money, he filled an 850-ton Canadian sealer with his men and materiel and hired a Norwegian skipper to sail it to the bottom of the world. The MV Theron was nearly trapped in pack ice as the Antarctic winter drew in, like Shackleton’s Endurance 43 years earlier. It escaped, but hundreds of crates of stores were lost to a storm surge as Fuchs’s team tried to unload them onto the Filchner ice shelf.
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This was terra incognita, hardly explored except by Shackleton himself. One of Lowe’s pictures of the unloading makes it look like an adventure training course for stout-hearted sons of empire. Most simply radiate desolation.
Eight men stayed to build base camp – one long hut containing kitchen, mess room, workshop, radio room and 16 bunks. The rest of the team left them to it, returning with the Antarctic spring for the big push.
When they came back, it was on an even bigger boat, with yet more kit. Lowe brought a record player and his favourite classical LPs to cheer up his hours in the dark room. (He couldn’t play it elsewhere in the hut because Fuchs disapproved of musical distractions.)
He went everywhere garlanded with cameras. He photographed the expedition as it overwintered a second time, as it floundered in the ice and as the ice eventually relented to Fuchs’s bloody-minded determination. There were long delays, especially when the Sno-Cats crashed through Antarctica’s surface crust of snow and ice into the great fissures so often hidden below. The team learnt how to extricate the machines by attaching steel cables to both ends and using the whole of the rest of the convoy to pull like crazy. Along risky sections, everyone would have to pile out and walk, poking through the surface with long poles in search of crevasses.
Progress was so slow at first that when the BBC got through on the long-wave radio, “We were frequently embarrassed into evasive responses,” Lowe writes. “ ‘Proceeding according to plan,’ the stock reply ... had a depressing ring to us, if not the outside world.”
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The slowness had another result: Hillary and the rest of the New Zealanders went much faster. They were travelling light, with more dogs and fewer machines. They had little scientific equipment to lug and no doubt why they were there – for the adventure. By January 4, 1958, Hillary had established his most southerly fuel depot two weeks ahead of schedule and was getting bored. He sent Fuchs a provocative message suggesting that since the bigger group was moving so slowly it should throw in the towel for the season, fly out and come back next year to complete the crossing. When Fuchs said he would be doing nothing of the kind, Hillary replied: “I’m going on a jaunt to the Pole.”
The whole exchange was leaked – by whom and whether or not by accident remains unclear. Either way, as far as the world’s media were concerned, the race to the Pole was on. In public, Fuchs and Hillary always insisted there was no race, no acrimony, not even a misunderstanding. But later Professor Klaus Dodds of the University of London interviewed both men and concluded that Fuchs felt upstaged by Hillary and annoyed that the race that wasn’t a race – won easily by Hillary – had been the story.
Lowe defends his old friend and fellow climber and says the whole thing was blown out of proportion. I’m not so sure. The bonhomie in some of his pictures of Hillary and Fuchs in the last stages of the expedition looks forced, albeit with the benefit of hindsight. At the very least they were proof that two Anglo-Saxon, lantern-jawed white male explorers can be different under the skin.
By March 1958 they were both back in London. Those who had overwintered twice had been away 28 months and were returning to a world changed subtly but for ever by the first flight of Sputnik. There won’t be anything quite like it, for explorers or the rest of us, until we go to Mars. In the meantime, it’s a wonderful thing that George Lowe’s words and pictures have been brought together for posterity, because there is no trace of the TAE on that lonely ice shelf where it all began. The ice has broken up, and the expedition hut has long since been swept out to sea.
The Crossing of Antarctica: Original Photographs from the Epic Journey that Fulfilled Shackleton’s Dream by George Lowe and Huw Lewis-Jones is published by Thames & Hudson on September 8. Photographs © 2014 George Lowe. It is available from the Times Bookshop for £22.45 (RRP £24.95), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk