Icy Graves E-Book

Stephen Haddelsey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 522

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Ever since Captain Cook first sailed into the Great Southern Ocean in 1773, mankind has sought to push back the boundaries of Antarctic exploration. The first expeditions tried simply to chart Antarctica's coastline, but then the Sixth International Geographical Congress of 1895 posed a greater challenge: the conquest of the continent itself. Though the loss of Captain Scott's Polar Party remains the most famous, many of the resulting expeditions suffered fatalities. Some men drowned; others fell into bottomless crevasses; many died in catastrophic fires; a few went mad; and yet more froze to death. Modern technology increased the pace of exploration, but aircraft and motor vehicles introduced entirely new dangers. For the first time, Icy Graves uses the tragic tales not only of famous explorers like Robert Falcon Scott and Aeneas Mackintosh but also of many lesser-known figures, both British and international, to plot the forward progress of Antarctic exploration. It tells, often in their own words, the compelling stories of the brave men and women who have fallen in what Sir Ernest Shackleton called the 'White Warfare of the South'.

Leseprobe

The remembrance of these experiences makes one almost fear to encourage good and brave men to penetrate these forbidding regions. But it is not all gloom and depression beyond the Polar circles. Sunshine and lively hope soon return.

Dr John Murray

Naturalist on the Challenger Expedition (1872–76)

‘The Renewal of Antarctic Exploration’

Geographical Journal, January 1894

Thus, as knowledge grows, the power of the explorer increases, and the old-time hardships that we read of seem curious fantasies or epics of heroic men battling blindly with ignorance.

Dr Robert Rudmose-Brown

Naturalist on the Scotia Expedition (1902–04)

‘Some Problems of Polar Geography’

Scottish Geographical Magazine, 1927

The great mystery of the South ever challenges to one fight more, and here death, dressed in storm, darkness, and cold, bandages no man’s eyes.

Admiral Richard E. Byrd

‘Our Navy Explores Antarctica’

National Geographic, October 1947

For the brothers Haddelsey,Richard and Martin

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Stephen Haddelsey, 2018

The right of Stephen Haddelsey to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8880 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Introduction

1   ‘The Worst Thing Possible’ – Fire in Antarctica

2   ‘Strengthening His Majesty’s Title’ – British Deaths on Sea Ice

3   ‘A Tremendous Asset’ – The Advent of Mechanised Transport

4   ‘A Peculiar Madness’ – Mental Illness and Suicide in Antarctica

5   ‘Spectacular Daring’ – The Birth of Antarctic Aviation

6   ‘Cold, Very Cold’ – Deaths by Hypothermia

Afterword: ‘They are of the Type …’ – Risk and Risk-Taking in the Antarctic

Notes

Select Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In examining the circumstances of so many fatalities it has, of course, been impossible not to form judgements regarding certain decisions made in the field. In doing so, I have been acutely aware of the potential criticisms that might ensue. After all, I was not there – and I do not claim first-hand familiarity with the challenges of operating in Antarctic conditions. For this reason, as well as basing my accounts very closely upon contemporary diaries, letters, reports, inquests and interview transcripts, I have repeatedly sought the opinion of those who were there, and who have experienced the conditions for themselves. I am, therefore, particularly grateful to the following Antarctic veterans for sharing their recollections and views, and, in some cases, for reading portions of the manuscript: Ray Berry (FIDS), Ken Blaiklock OBE (FIDS & Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition), Dr John Dudeney OBE (BAS), Peter Gibbs (FIDS), Professor Rainer Goldsmith (Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition), John Hall MBE (BAS), Dr Graham Hurst (BAS), Dr Des Lugg (Australian Antarctic Division), Dr David Pratt CBE, FIMechE (Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition), Roderick Rhys Jones (BAS & British Antarctic Monument Trust), Pete Salino (BAS), the late Professor William Sladen MBE (FIDS), and Dr Yoshio Yoshida (Fourth Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition). Any opinions expressed, and mistakes committed, remain the sole responsibility of the author.

In addition, I have benefited enormously from the assistance of Billy-Ace Baker (American Polar Society), James Brooks (Head of Court and Tribunals Service, the Falkland Islands Government), Brian Dorsett-Bailey (brother of Jeremy Bailey), Mrs Irene Gillies (sister of Alistair ‘Jock’ Forbes), Dr Henry Guly (BAS Medical Unit), Derek Gunn (son of Bernie Gunn), Professor Matthew Hall (Professor of Law & Criminal Justice, University of Lincoln), David Harrowfield, Dr David Keatley (School of Psychology, University of Lincoln), the Coroner’s Office of the Falkland Islands Government, Dr Peter Marquis (BAS), Mayumi Miyashita (National Institute of Polar Research, Japan), Richard McElrea (New Zealand Coroner), Gary Pierson (South-pole.com), Mrs Jocelyn Sladen (wife of Professor William Sladen), Robert B. Stephenson of the Antarctic Circle website (www.antarctic-circle.org) and Ivar Stokkeland (Norwegian Polar Institute).

In particular, I should like to express my gratitude to Ieaun Hopkins, Jo Rae and Beverley Ager of the British Antarctic Survey’s Archives Department, whose expertise and generosity with their time have made researching this book infinitely easier than it might otherwise have been.

Finally, I should like to thank my wife, Caroline, and my son, George, for all their love and support – and for heroically resisting the temptation to roll their eyes when I began to regale them with yet more anecdotes relating to the exploration of Antarctica.

Stephen HaddelseyHalam, NottinghamshireSeptember 2017

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In writing this book my intention has not been to provide a comprehensive list of every fatality suffered during the exploration of Antarctica, for such a list I refer the reader to John Stewart’s excellent Antarctica: An Encyclopedia (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1990). Instead, I have sought to identify a range of accidents which, arranged thematically, should serve to highlight some of the more common hazards faced by those who, over the course of the last century or so, have been actively engaged in pushing back the boundaries of our geographic and scientific knowledge of the continent.

For a number of reasons, which include language, accessibility and the comprehensiveness of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Archives, many of the examples cited are from the United Kingdom; however, so far as has been practicable, I have included representative stories from as many nations as possible, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Finally, I have chosen, quite deliberately, to restrict myself to deaths that have occurred during expeditions dedicated to the exploration and scientific investigation of the continental landmass, the vast majority of these being government sponsored. Excluded, therefore (with only two exceptions), are casualties sustained at sea, during tourism, and in privately organised small-scale ventures where tests of human endurance are the aim rather than a consequence of the exercise.

INTRODUCTION

On the morning of 22 January 1913, a party of eight men struggled to the summit of Observation Hill on the south-west tip of Ross Island, Antarctica. Between them they carried a 3.5m-long cross of Australian mahogany gum tree, or Eucalyptus marginata, a densely grained hardwood known to the Aborigines as jarrah. ‘It was a heavy job,’ wrote the amateur zoologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard that evening, ‘and the ice was looking very bad all around, and I for one was glad when we had got it up by 5 o’clock or so.’1

Once slotted into a hole dug the previous day, the white-painted cross stood 2.5m tall, commanding McMurdo Sound on one side and the barren white wasteland of the Ross Ice Shelf, or the ‘Great Barrier’ as it was then known, on the other. ‘It is really magnificent,’ Cherry-Garrard enthused, ‘and will be a permanent memorial which could be seen from the ship nine miles [14.5km] off with a naked eye … I do not believe it will ever move.’2

The cross commemorates the sacrifice of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Dr Edward Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, Petty Officer Edgar Evans and Captain Lawrence Oates, and the men who raised it intended that it should endure; what they could not have foreseen was that this landmark would become the single most recognisable icon, certainly of British, and arguably of all, ‘Heroic Age’ Antarctic exploration. Nearly half a century later, recalling his own very recent initiation into polar exploration, Sir Edmund Hillary would write:

My ideas of the Antarctic were hazy in the extreme and, if I thought about it at all, I imagined a sombre land of bitter cold and heroic suffering, of serious men dedicated to impossible ideals, and of lonely crosses out in the snowy wastes.3

In January 1957 Hillary had established his own winter quarters almost in the shadow of Observation Hill, so there can be no doubt that he was thinking of Scott’s memorial.

In the sixty years since Hillary wrote his account of his essential, but highly contentious, part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (CTAE) of 1956–58, our perceptions of the expeditions launched by the Edwardian polar explorers have changed remarkably little. Just like Hillary, we anticipate stories of frostbitten heroes slogging across barren landscapes, hauling unbearably heavy sledges towards impossible goals. And, in our imaginings, they usually die in the process, lying in sodden reindeer skin sleeping bags, exhausted, emaciated and with their hands and faces blackened with frostbite. No matter whether their labours are seen as heroic and noble (as they were by Scott’s hagiographic early biographers) or futile and ill-judged (as many revisionist historians argue), suffering and death sit at the core of our perception of the first Antarctic explorers.

The identification of death as a defining characteristic of their expeditions began with the very earliest commentators. The British polar historian James Gordon Hayes, who coined the term the ‘Heroic Age’ in his 1932 book The Conquest of the South Pole, described the period as beginning when Scott embarked on the Discovery in 1901 and ending with Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition in 1917.

Although the phrase is now commonly applied to a slightly wider period, beginning with the Sixth International Geographical Congress of 1895 and terminating with Shackleton’s death at the outset of his Quest Expedition in 1922,4 its main features, as summarised by Hayes, remain unchanged. Its work was accomplished ‘for the most part under difficult conditions’; its successes were achieved with imperfect means, ‘the man was greater than the machine’; its stories form a record of how ‘for the last time in human history, large parts of an unknown continent have been unveiled’; and, finally, its prosecution was acutely dangerous, particularly for the British explorers whose footsteps ‘were continually dogged by disaster’. For Hayes, these attributes, or shortcomings, appeared to render the exploits of the explorers of the first quarter of the twentieth century more perilous, more romantic and therefore intrinsically more appealing than the expeditions that followed. And yet a comparison of the earlier and later expeditions reveals that they had much more in common than we might suppose – and this is nowhere more evident than in their casualty statistics.

Of the 664 men estimated to have taken part in the expeditions launched between 1895 and 1922,5 nineteen died – approximately 2.9 per cent of the total.6 Of these, seven died of starvation, hypothermia or vitamin deficiencies while on long-distance sledging expeditions; three drowned or were killed in shipboard accidents; five succumbed to disease; three died on local sledging expeditions; and one died in a crevasse fall, during a long-distance sledging expedition but on the outbound journey, while in good health and with ample supplies of food and fuel. Expressed another way, this means that each man who took part in an Antarctic expedition between 1895 and 1922 faced a one in thirty-five chance of death. Although the risks varied significantly depending upon the exact duties of the individuals involved, with a base cook less likely to die than a long-distance sledger, these odds do not appear to be too unfavourable, given the harshness of the environment, the pioneering nature of the work, the limitations of the equipment and knowledge then available and the distance of the expeditions from external aid.

As Hayes acknowledged, a higher proportion of British explorers ‘purchased their discoveries with their lives’,7 and of the 155 men involved in the shore-based operations of the British expeditions launched between 1901 and 1921, ten died – 6.5 per cent of the total, equivalent to a one in sixteen chance of death. As might be expected, the year that generated the highest number of casualties was 1912, simultaneously the annus mirabilis and annus horribilis of Heroic Age exploration, when five expeditions were in the field. In total, eight men died between 17 February and 14 December, of whom all but one was British.8

It’s difficult to calculate accurately the total number of fatalities for all nations during what we might, for convenience, describe as the ‘Post-Heroic’ period, but we do have detailed figures for British and US operations. Between 1922, the year of Shackleton’s death, and 1961, the year in which the International Antarctic Treaty was ratified, the United States lost thirty-one men and the British lost eleven,9 with all these casualties sustained between 1946 and 1961.

At first glance, the loss of forty-two lives in just fifteen years seems excessive, especially when compared with the nineteen lost during the twenty-seven years of the Heroic Age, but this perception does not take into account the huge increase in activity in the same period. For instance, during the austral summer of 1946–47, the United States sent 4,700 men south as part of its colossal Cold War exercise, Operation Highjump. Of these, just four died (a casualty rate of 0.09 per cent). Although numbers reduced after the operation, with just 179 men divided between twenty stations operated by eleven different nations during 1955, they increased exponentially during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58, with a winter population of 912 men, rising in the summer months to approximately 5,000.10 In that period, Britain sustained three casualties (2.4 per cent of the total British personnel of 127, or a one in forty-two chance of death) and the United States sustained nine (2.7 per cent of 339 personnel, or one in thirty-eight).

Given our perception of the heightened dangerousness of the early period of Antarctic exploration, it’s surprising to see that the difference in the chance of death during the Heroic and Post-Heroic eras is not as great as we might expect – particularly when those deaths are considered as percentages of the personnel as a whole. Writing of the casualties sustained during the IGY, Walter Sullivan, who reported on the enterprise for The New York Times, opined:

Such mishaps were due, essentially, to the novelty of the environment in which men and equipment had been called upon to operate. Had the nature of the hazards been fully understood, they would not have been much greater than those confronting the man who tries to dash across Fifth Avenue against the lights. The difference was that the jaywalker, however foolhardy, has usually lived with city traffic all his life.11

Of course, the hazards referred to by Sullivan are essentially the same for all Antarctic expeditions and in order to understand the enduring appeal of polar exploration we must first recognise the uniqueness and the challenges of the environment in which that exploration was, and is, prosecuted.

A continent of more than 8 million square kilometres, Antarctica is the coldest, driest, highest and windiest land mass on the face of the globe, with 98 per cent of its surface area permanently covered in ice and snow to depths that can exceed 3km. Mean temperatures range between -40°C and -70°C during the long, dark winter months, while winds that gust at well over 322kph not only reduce visibility by hurling clouds of drift snow into the air but also, through the phenomenon known as the ‘wind chill factor’,12 remove heat from a body so that it quickly cools to the current air temperature. In these conditions, exposed flesh freezes almost immediately, resulting in damage that, in the worst cases, can mean the loss of extremities such as fingers, toes, nose and ears. Eyelashes freeze together, gluing eyes shut, and exhaled breath and nasal mucous congeal to form heavy ‘ice masks’ that must be thawed or cut away. Even teeth will split with the cold, as happened to Edward Wilson’s Cape Crozier party during the Terra Nova Expedition.

On clear days, the power of the sun, the lack of water vapour in the air and the reflective glare of the ice, will combine to severely burn unprotected skin. If goggles are not worn, the eyes, too, will burn, causing photokeratitis, or snow-blindness, a temporary but acutely painful loss of vision that makes the sufferer feel as though their eyes are full of sand. On cloudy days, even during the summer months, perception can be massively distorted as a result of the loss of the visual clues usually provided by colour and contrast: objects lying only a foot away can appear to be far distant, and vice versa. Frank Bickerton, mechanical engineer on Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) of 1911–14, memorably compared this phenomenon of ‘white-out’ to ‘living in a spherical tent made of sheets, except for the wind. Such days were an outrage to our senses.’13 If forced to endure such disorientation for long, he thought, ‘you would soon go mad’.14

In these conditions travel, whether by foot or vehicle, becomes impossible or, at best, extremely perilous – particularly where crevasses are present. These fissures are formed as the ice sheets flowing down from the Polar Plateau buckle and split as they collide with underlying surface inequalities, with mountains, and with each other. Over time, the mouths of the crevasses are plugged by drift snow that renders them largely invisible and therefore doubly dangerous. The strength of the snow bridges formed in this fashion is dependent upon a number of factors including depth, width and air temperature and, in the event of a collapse, the larger crevasses are quite capable of swallowing a man, a dog team or even a motor vehicle. During the IGY, a series of fatalities sustained during routine vehicle movements close to base demonstrated just how vulnerable tractor drivers could be, with the result that long-distance motorised parties often travelled no faster than the man-hauled sledges of the Heroic Age – a fact that caused the US scientist Palle Mogensen to remark dolefully, ‘With all this horsepower and modern equipment, we can’t do better than they did – twenty miles a day!’15

A combination of white-out, high winds, tidal changes and fluctuations in temperature also significantly increases the risk of travelling on sea or bay ice, as two members of Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition discovered to their cost when, on 8 May 1916, the young sea ice on which they were travelling from Hut Point to Cape Evans broke up during a blizzard. They were the first Antarctic explorers to die in such a fashion, but many more followed, and in the twenty-four years between 1958 and 1982, the break-up of sea ice claimed no fewer than seven lives from Britain alone.

The changes wrought in the landscape by such conditions can also prove fatally disorienting, as happened on 23 February 1951, when three members of the Norwegian–British–Swedish Antarctic Expedition drove their Studebaker Weasel over a newly formed and invisible ice edge, straight into the killingly cold waters of the Weddell Sea.

As well as causing the destruction of sea ice, the action of the strong katabatic winds sculpts the surface ice into sastrugi, wave-like crests that can be up to 1.5m tall and as hard as iron. It is these sastrugi that have caused so many explorers to compare the Antarctic landscape to a frozen sea and they constitute a major obstacle, not only to those travelling over the surface but also to anyone trying to land an aircraft, as Hillary and his RNZAF pilot, John Claydon, found on 25 January 1957 when they only narrowly avoided ripping the skis from their de Havilland Beaver.

Where the scouring action of the wind is absent, soft snow collects in layers so deep that a man on foot will sink to his groin, making every step a struggle. If this accumulation occurs on floating ice, its weight can be sufficient to push the underlying ice beneath the surface of the water, so that anyone attempting to cross it is likely to suffer from wet as well as cold feet. During Operation Tabarin, a top-secret wartime expedition designed to re-establish British sovereignty in the face of Argentine incursions, a sledging party encountered this phenomenon while traversing Erebus and Terror Gulf on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. In temperatures of -34°C, their feet became encased in solid casts of ice as soon as they lifted them from the deep snow, significantly increasing the risk of frostbite.

To further exacerbate the difficulties of those navigating without the benefit of the Global Positioning System, the close proximity of the Magnetic South Pole renders magnetic compasses erratic and unreliable while, on overcast days, the alternative sun compass becomes equally useless. In these conditions, even an experienced polar traveller can stray unwittingly from his chosen course and enter a crevasse field, with potentially devastating results.

Finally, and of particular relevance to those seeking to reach the South Pole – the primary objective of many, though not all, early expeditions – the lifeless interior of the continent rises to around 4,267m above sea level. At this altitude, the atmosphere becomes so rarefied that the performance of men, dogs and motor vehicles is seriously inhibited, and for many years aircraft trying to take off from the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station could do so only with the aid of Jet Assisted Take-Off (JATO) solid-fuel rockets.

* * *

These, then, are the natural conditions common to all Antarctic expeditions; it is in their knowledge, equipment and tactics that they differ. In fact, though we often think of the early explorers as ordinary men, striving against extraordinary obstacles with only the most primitive aids to support them, innovative technology formed a part of every Heroic Age British foray into Antarctica: Scott’s National Antarctic (Discovery) Expedition of 1901–04 carried a hot air balloon; Shackleton’s 1907 British Antarctic (Nimrod) Expedition included a four-cylinder, 15hp Arrol-Johnston motor car in its equipment; and Mawson purchased both a Vickers REP monoplane and the latest wireless sets for his 1911 expedition. Scott and Shackleton would both take motorised sledges on their later expeditions and a de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane became central to Mawson’s plans for his British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) of 1929–31.

In choosing to adopt the very latest technology available to them, the Heroic Age explorers were quite deliberately following the example of some of the earliest expeditions into Antarctic waters, most notably James Cook’s second voyage of discovery (1772–75), during which the canny Yorkshireman made full use of a copy of John Harrison’s revolutionary fourth chronometer to establish his longitude.16 Just like Cook, Scott, Shackleton and their peers all believed that technology could ease their labours and make their objectives more attainable. So far as motor vehicles were concerned, Scott was ‘convinced of their value’,17 while Shackleton put up a fierce defence when the utility of his motor-sledges was challenged by a sceptical committee of the Royal Geographical Society in March 1914. These men were not temperamentally or philosophically wedded to a bygone age, but all too often the latest products of the industrial age failed to live up to their expectations and forced them to revert to more primitive but tried and tested methods.

Temperamental though it might be, it is also true that no casualty on the early expeditions was directly attributable to the experimental technology: balloons ascended and descended without an explorer plummeting to his death, and while the motorised sledges broke down with tiresome regularity, they did so without exploding or carrying an unwary driver through the sea ice or into the depths of an unseen crevasse. Indeed, the closest a Heroic Age explorer ever came to being killed by new technology was when, on 5 October 1911, the AAE’s Vickers monoplane fell to earth, injuring both Frank Wild, the veteran English explorer, and the pilot, Hugh Watkins. Ironically, however, this accident occurred not in Antarctica but at the Cheltenham Racecourse in Adelaide, weeks before Mawson’s expedition sailed south. In reality, it was only with the advent of more reliable motor vehicles and aircraft that the first deaths began to occur, though most resulted from human error rather than from mechanical failure.

With the gradual refinement and improvement of technology over the coming decades, entirely new challenges and fresh variations to old dangers were encountered, many of which could not have been foreseen. The CTAE, for example, would almost certainly have failed without the Tucker Sno-Cats that became the mainstay of Vivian Fuchs’s transcontinental journey. Powered by a 200hp Chrysler V8 petrol engine and with a top speed of 24kph, the Sno-Cat’s greatest advantage was its unique traction system, which provided almost 100 per cent traction even when turning in soft snow. But its design also contained a number of flaws. In particular, a complicated lubrication system meant that the convoy had to stop every few days so that a grease gun could be applied to each vehicle’s 320 individual grease nipples – a tedious job even in a heated garage, and triply so on the Polar Plateau, with a temperature of -29°C and a wind blowing at 40kph. ‘And imagine what a grease gun does in a stiff breeze,’ one expeditionary recalled with a shudder, ‘you get oil everywhere, all over your anoraks – filthy!’18 Worse still, fabric impregnated with grease cannot breathe properly and body moisture becomes trapped. This means that clothes lose their insulation value and their wearers become more prone to frostbite and hypothermia, despite having taken all the usual precautions.

Problems such as these meant that many of the non-engineering staff of both Heroic and Post-Heroic expeditions came to regard their vehicles with uncertainty and even antipathy. After watching the trials of Shackleton’s propeller sledge in Norway in May 1914, expedition artist George Marston remarked pessimistically, ‘Perhaps it will go for twenty min[utes]’,19 while, for his part, when asked about the potential for the development of emotional ties with the machines used a little over forty years later, CTAE surveyor Ken Blaiklock recalled, ‘Most people just regarded them as a lump of metal to get from A to B … No, I don’t think there was any attachment in that way.’20 Dog-drivers like Blaiklock were also keen to point out that dogs on a fan trace will almost always stop safely in the event of one of their number falling into an unseen crevasse; the same could hardly be said of a 3-tonne Sno-Cat.

Similarly, while it might seem perfectly reasonable to suppose that the introduction of wireless telegraphy would constitute an unequivocal boon to polar explorers, the evidence reveals that, from the outset, its psychological effects were mixed. When preparing for his Terra Nova Expedition, Scott considered including a transmitter and a generator in his equipment, but eventually he was dissuaded by their size and combined weight. Instead, Mawson made the pioneering experiment, taking two complete sets of Telefunken apparatus on his AAE.21 He knew that if the expedition succeeded in sending and receiving messages via a relay station on Macquarie Island some of the doubt and uncertainty inherent in Antarctic exploration would be effectively removed and for the first time an expedition would be able to announce to the outside world both its achievements and, perhaps more importantly, its exact location.

During the AAE’s first year success was extremely limited, with the operator on Macquarie Island able to pick up only disjointed words and phrases from the messages dispatched from Cape Denison on the Antarctic mainland. But, after the erection of a new aerial mast, communication improved during the second year and an important precedent was set. And yet, surprisingly, the wireless seemed to make so little difference to the explorers’ lives that Archie McLean, the medical officer, observed, ‘We … scarcely think about the fact that it is the first time any Polar expedition wintering has been in wireless communication with the outside world.’22 Mawson’s insistence that his men should pay for sending personal messages – a decision forced on him by the parlous condition of the AAE’s finances – further discouraged use and, finally, the senior operator’s descent into madness turned the wireless into a liability when he began to send garbled and paranoid transmissions to the outside world and to hide or deliberately mistranslate incoming messages. As a result, the introduction of wireless to the Antarctic has become inextricably linked with one of the most florid of all examples of mental illness in the polar regions.

The double-edged nature of wireless communication continued to be apparent in the Post-Heroic period. In a curious and probably unique inversion, when sitting comparatively snug and secure in their hut on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the personnel of Operation Tabarin found themselves listening, courtesy of the BBC’s live broadcasts from London, to the profoundly disturbing sounds of German bombs falling on their homes in England – an experience hardly likely to reconcile them to their separation from family and friends. Even in less extreme circumstances, many explorers discovered that wireless increased rather than reduced their feelings of isolation, with some finding that their day-to-day lives had become so different to the routine experiences of those at home that they had little or nothing to say to one another. After one exchange, Rainer Goldsmith, the physiologist with the CTAE’s Advance Party, observed dejectedly, ‘They have very little understanding of the sort of things that we might be interested in.’23 Blaiklock, the Advance Party’s leader, also acknowledged that, in their isolation, explorers become:

… very parochial … five minutes after the outbreak of the Vietnam War, for example, you’re discussing have we got enough dog meat? You’re very self-centred shall we say? You’re concerned with your own problems, the whole base’s problems, not the world’s.24

All too often, the fact that wireless changed explorers’ expectations regarding the frequency and content of communications was entirely lost upon officials at home and in a paper entitled ‘Cold Weather Hazards’, Eric Back, the medical officer to Operation Tabarin, stated:

In order to keep up the morale of isolated parties they should be kept informed of the work in hand … The sense of frustration experienced by men completely isolated in the cold and given no information about future plans can be extremely galling and is often not appreciated by those at home.25

But, as Fuchs learned during the CTAE, the reverse could also be true. Having embarked upon one of the most hazardous portions of his journey, he found himself so distracted by the clamour of the BBC and his expedition committee for daily updates and press releases that he feigned wireless blackouts in order to bend his mind to rather more pressing matters.26

The impacts of wireless, then, have been much more complex than might have been expected and some studies have even shown that parties working in the most remote, isolated and demanding environments actually perform better, both physically and mentally, than those more subject to outside influences. Though it would be wrong to suggest that its role was in any way decisive, there is even evidence that wireless, and the responsibilities its maintenance entailed, played some part in the suicide of Arthur Farrant at Deception Island in November 1953.

Without doubt, the technological innovation that truly transformed Antarctic exploration was the advent of powered flight. Hubert Wilkins, Richard E. Byrd, Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, Douglas Mawson, John Rymill and Lincoln Ellsworth all successfully used aeroplanes in the Antarctic during the 1920s and 1930s, but their operations were on a tiny scale when compared with the post-war era. The frequency and duration of flights during the IGY dwarfed anything that had gone before – as can be gauged from the fact that, in the three months between 20 November 1956 and 21 February 1957, the United States Navy airlifted 772 tonnes of cargo to the South Pole in sixty-five separate sorties.

For all its benefits, such a colossal expansion of air activity in polar conditions must itself increase the likelihood of accidents, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s the death toll from aircraft accidents rose exponentially. Add to the unavoidable environmental factors, including white-outs, high winds and poor surface conditions, the fact that much of the flying was completed in large aircraft, such as the Douglas C-124 Globemaster and the Lockheed P2V Neptune, and the probability of multiple casualties being sustained in just one accident also increased. This reality was tragically proved on 18 October 1956 when a Neptune crashed at McMurdo, killing four, and again on 16 October 1958 when six men died in a Globemaster crash in the Admiralty Mountains. However, the potential for air accidents to skew the figures was most potently demonstrated on 28 November 1979 when, in the worst of all disasters in the Antarctic, an Air New Zealand McDonnell Douglas DC-10 ploughed into the slopes of Mount Erebus, killing all 257 passengers and crew.

* * *

Even if we discount such ‘freak’ catastrophes as the loss of Air New Zealand Flight 901, air crashes account for more deaths in the Antarctic than any other single cause. But, of course, it is also true that the vast majority of the casualties sustained during routine flights in support of Antarctic operations have been suffered by the United States, the scale of whose air activity is vastly greater than that of any other nation.

For countries with a smaller presence in the Antarctic, environmental conditions continue to pose the greatest threat. For example, of the twenty-seven casualties sustained by the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) and its successor, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), between 1948 and the present day, a total of twenty-two are directly attributable to drowning, the break-up of sea ice, crevasse falls (including five in, or on, vehicles), exposure or climbing accidents. Of the remaining five, two men died in a fire, one suffered a heart attack, one committed suicide and one was struck by a low-flying aircraft. Neither FIDS nor BAS have suffered any deaths among the passengers or crew of their aircraft, though there have been innumerable narrow escapes, usually as a result of forced landings.

Inevitably, the environmental conditions that have caused so many fatalities can also generate psychological and physiological responses that can seriously affect the mental well-being of those engaged in exploration and research. Causes and effects are generally much better understood today than they were a century ago, but prevention is still problematic, and debate continues about the effectiveness of the psychological profiling of candidates for Antarctic field work. The phenomenon known colloquially as ‘cabin fever’, for instance, is a well-documented condition directly attributable to long periods spent in isolation and winter darkness. Its onset is marked by restlessness, irritability, irrational frustration, disturbed sleep patterns and paranoia, and it is now known to result from a lack of sunlight, which in turn accelerates the pineal gland’s secretion of melatonin. Its seriousness varies according to the individual but on a small base its effects, if not managed carefully, can be highly disruptive and even catastrophic – particularly when they are combined with other factors, such as a poor or insufficient diet, lack of privacy, limited recreation, absence of sex, poor communications, personal incompatibility, and pre-existing mental conditions such as depression.

In the event of trauma or death, post-traumatic stress can be added to this catalogue – and the impact of a fatality on a small, close-knit and mutually dependent community should not be underestimated, however much the mechanisms and support for dealing with the emotional aftermath might change over time. It is a telling fact that, where fatalities have been sustained, survivors generally have chosen not to erect memorial crosses until the point of their own departure – perhaps because they were keen to avoid living in the shadow of such depressing reminders. A parallel might be found in the habit of wartime squadrons not to allow empty chairs at the mess table or to discuss the fallen. How much worse, then, is the position when bodies are recovered and where the facilities available to modern expeditions enable the eventual repatriation of corpses. In these situations, those in mourning must continue their work, knowing that the bodies of their companions are held in storage just a few metres from where they continue to eat, sleep and work.

Given this occasionally toxic cocktail of environmental and psychological factors it is surprising that suicide remains a highly unusual phenomenon on polar bases. Murder is absolutely unknown, though the death, on 12 May 2000, of Dr Rodney Marks, a 32-year-old Australian astrophysicist, gave rise to much speculation. Marks died from imbibing methanol but, according to the New Zealand Coroner’s inquest, ‘there was no suggestion of suicide’,27 and no satisfactory explanation of how and why he drank the methanol has ever been forthcoming. The coroner, Richard McElrea, found that the death was ‘unintended’, but the mysterious disappearance from Marks’ room of ‘a weird bottle, with the prawn on the side’,28 and the fact that his poisoning highlighted ‘an unsatisfactory hiatus as to the proper investigation of a death occurring in Antarctica under these circumstances’29 inevitably resulted in many newspapers reporting the death as potentially ‘the first South Pole murder’.30

* * *

In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the early Antarctic expeditions were only marginally riskier than those that followed, in popular perception the Heroic Age remains a distinct period, defined by tragedy and sacrifice. The Post-Heroic period, on the other hand, is seen as comparatively ‘safe’ and its activities not only routine but also facilitated by the unequivocally beneficial impacts of modern technology. James Gordon Hayes was quite definite on the subject, asserting that it was because of the early explorers’ sacrifices that he ‘suggested that this period should be known as the Heroic Age’.31 He also argued that the expeditions that followed the death of Shackleton were quite different – and while Hayes’ work is now largely forgotten, the taxonomy of polar exploration that he defined lives on.

In recent years, cultural historians like Stephanie Barczewski and Max Jones have done much to chart the process by which Scott and his companions achieved virtual canonisation in the years immediately after their deaths, embodying as they did all the qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice so beloved of the empire.32 And while public perception of imperial heroes has undergone substantial revision over the course of the last century – a process begun by Lytton Strachey, but nowhere more noticeable than in the movement from the hagiographic early biographies of Scott by writers like Harold Avery and Stephen Gwynn to Roland Huntford’s vitriolic debunking in Scott and Amundsen – these changes have done nothing to stifle interest in the Heroic Age.

An unfortunate consequence of Hayes’ categorisation and of our obsession with the Heroic Age – an obsession fuelled, in part at least, by our mistaken conviction that its risks exceeded those of later periods – is that the achievements, personalities and sacrifices of the Post-Heroic phase of Antarctic exploration have been largely obscured. While the parallel careers of Scott and Shackleton have spawned a quite extraordinary number of biographies, narrative histories, management studies and deconstructions, books on the most important British expeditions of the later period have been limited to the official accounts published in the immediate aftermath of those ventures.33 There is, for instance, no popular narrative history of Rymill’s British Graham Land Expedition (BGLE) of 1934–37, despite its being widely acknowledged as one of the most important and successful British expeditions of the first half of the twentieth century. Similarly, only in very recent years have Operation Tabarin and Fuchs’s CTAE received any attention from popular historians.34

And yet it is an irrefutable fact that the vast majority of the Antarctic continent was explored not by the men of the Heroic Age, but by their successors. During the CTAE alone, Fuchs’s Advance and Crossing parties discovered two new mountain ranges and traversed for the first time the seemingly endless wilderness that lies between Vahsel Bay and the South Pole. On the other side of the continent, George Marsh and Bob Miller of Hillary’s Ross Sea Party discovered another two new mountain ranges, proved that the Queen Alexandra Range was made up of five distinct chains, and located four new glacier systems. Meanwhile, Richard Brooke and his Northern Party sledged well over 1,000 miles and climbed an astonishing thirty-one mountains, most of which had never previously been scaled.

The explorers of the Post-Heroic phase also achieved a number of important ‘firsts’: the first flight to the South Pole (Byrd, 1929); the first transcontinental flight (Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon, 1935); the first motorised journey to the Pole (Hillary, 1957–58); and the first surface crossing of the continent (Fuchs, 1957–58). Nor could these achievements be described as the ‘dregs’ left by the explorers of the Heroic Age. Completion of a surface crossing, in particular, was an ambition of Bruce, Scott, Shackleton and Filchner, and held by many to be at least equally desirable as reaching the South Pole. Indeed, while it had long been accepted that a traverse of the continent would have undeniable scientific and geographical benefits, not least the ability to determine whether Antarctica was a continent or a huge archipelago, a sizeable contingent of ‘scientific explorers’ saw little intrinsic value in the conquest of the pole.

In all probability, men like Scott, Shackleton, Byrd, Rymill and Fuchs would have considered themselves fellow travellers in a historical and exploratory continuum. Each was keen to use the best equipment and techniques available to him – but each knew that the environment in which he operated could render that equipment and those techniques futile, redundant and even dangerous. Certainly, we can be confident that the phrase ‘Heroic Age’, a retrospectively applied collective term, would have meant nothing to the men who took part in the expeditions of the period. Indeed, the term ‘hero’ tends to sit far more comfortably with the dead than with the living and it is very doubtful that Scott and his companions would have accepted it willingly.

Similarly, the later explorers did not recognise the existence of an unbridgeable gulf between themselves and their predecessors; instead, they saw themselves as inheritors of the ‘heroic tradition’. George Lowe, official photographer on Fuchs’ expedition, was quite typical when, in the immediate aftermath of the CTAE, he looked back to the expeditions of Scott and Amundsen as the benchmark by which to measure Fuchs’ achievement. ‘Although we used vehicles we still clung to camping and eating rules of the past …’ he wrote in The Mountain World:

Then, Amundsen with his dogs or Scott on foot walked the 1,800 desperate miles. Amundsen averaged 17 miles a day with his dog teams and returned according to plan; Scott averaged a dozen miles a day and died tragically within a hundred miles of his base … in the future there will be no place for the lightly equipped hardy dash which was the spirit in which our expedition was conceived.35

For his part, Rainer Goldsmith described the CTAE as, quite simply, ‘the last of the heroic expeditions – full stop!’36

To this day, curious and intrepid men and women continue to explore, research and document the Antarctic continent, and while an improved understanding of the risks involved, a tightening of safety procedures and swifter evacuation all mean that death is no longer ever-present, it is still a regular visitor. To evidence this fact, one need only look at the tally of casualties among the various international Antarctic programmes during the twenty-first century: one British (in 2003); one Russian (2008); two South African (2006 and 2009); two Brazilian (2012); and one Australian (2016).

Recognising the high and continuing cost in human lives of Antarctic exploration, on 10 May 2011 the British Antarctic Monument Trust unveiled a new memorial of Welsh slate and Carrara marble in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, dedicating it to all ‘those who lost their lives in Antarctica’. Fittingly, the memorial makes no distinctions regarding roles, ranks, gender, causes of death or the period in which those deaths occurred: all are commemorated equally.

In the following pages, we will meet many of those intrepid explorers and scientists, of all nations, and examine how and why they died ‘in pursuit of science to benefit us all’.

1

‘THE WORST THING POSSIBLE’

FIRE IN ANTARCTICA

Ever since manned space flight became a viable proposition, it has been widely accepted that Antarctic research stations provide perhaps the best opportunities to study many of the environmental, social and psychological conditions that astronauts might experience on long-duration missions to planets such as Mars, and during extended tours at the International Space Station.1 In particular, psychologists have been keen to determine, first, how protracted periods of confinement in small social groups and in extreme environments can affect group and team dynamics and performance; and, second, whether there are certain personality types that prove more resilient to the stresses inseparable from life in such conditions. Some of the analogous environmental factors cited by researchers include isolation, restricted society and remoteness from external aid. However, there are also shared physical dangers that are less commonly referenced and chief among these is fire.

Robert Friedman of NASA’s Lewis Research Center has written that, in space, ‘Fire events, even though they have a very low probability of occurrence, are considered serious threats and [are] greatly feared’, and he cites the lack of room available in spacecraft cockpits for the storage of firefighting equipment and ‘the limited understanding of the unusual characteristics of incipient fires in the low-gravity, weightless environment of orbiting spacecraft’ as two of the most important contributing factors.2

Neither of these particular problems has been encountered in Antarctic expedition huts, but they, too, have suffered from their own unique and environment-specific fire risks: manufactured almost entirely of wood, the early expedition huts were heated by solid-fuel burners and lit by liquid fuel lanterns; most expedition personnel smoked tobacco; and, in the winter months, accumulations of drift snow could quickly block windows and doors.

In the near-total absence of any naturally occurring combustible materials,3 the risk of fire in Antarctica is a man-made phenomenon – but the prevailing environmental conditions, including high winds, the desiccating effects of low humidity and the absence of liquid water for dowsing flames, all increase the threat substantially. For much of the twentieth century, building materials and operating practices meant that the consequences of a base fire could be catastrophic, destroying in a few devastating minutes accommodation, fuel, food, clothing, scientific, survey and construction equipment, wireless sets, scientific collections and written records – to say nothing of the lives of the men themselves. Even today, the United States’ Antarctic Fire Department acknowledges that, at McMurdo, ‘the loss of a single structure could effectively shut down a significant portion of station operations, if not the entire station altogether’, while at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, ‘every square inch is vital to station operations. Damage from fire could have catastrophic consequences for station operations.’4 And yet, despite the introduction of non-flammable and fire-resistant materials, better firefighting equipment and training, and improvements to base design, including the wide separation of buildings, all too often the best way to react to a well-established fire is still to stand back and let it burn.

* * *

The first accidental fire recorded in Antarctica occurred during the Southern Cross Expedition of 1898–1900, the second of the expeditions launched after the Sixth International Geographical Congress of 1895, and the first nominally British expedition of the Heroic Age.5

Under its Norwegian-British leader, Carsten Borchgrevink, the expedition landed at Cape Adare, on the north-western tip of Ross Island, on 17 February 1899. The prefabricated living and storage huts, and a magnetic observation hut built from spare materials were complete by the beginning of March and, after some specimen collecting and localised sledging on the sea ice of Robertson Bay, the shore party of ten men settled down for the winter. According to Louis Bernacchi, the expedition’s Australian physicist, the cramped conditions within the hut and the darkness and cold without meant that very little work was done during the winter months; instead, the men ‘waxed fat and apathetic out of pure inertion and sloth; it was’, he opined, ‘a life of merely bovine repose’.6

This repose was shattered in the early hours of 24 July. ‘I awoke through a suffocating smoke,’ wrote Borchgrevink, ‘and found that one of the members had his bunk on fire.’7 Given that some reviewers later criticised the sensationalism of his expedition narrative – a product, probably, of the influence of his sponsor, George Newnes, the newspaper magnate – Borchgrevink’s account of this potentially devastating incident is both brief and surprisingly matter-of-fact. ‘It gave us rather a start,’ he observed, ‘and I took extra precautions against fire.’8 For his part, Bernacchi recognised that, if it had been discovered any later, the fire would have become ‘a serious catastrophe’ and, potentially, ‘the most terrible thing that could have happened to us there’:

Being built of pine [the huts] would have been consumed in a few minutes, and we would have had little time to save anything. [Exposure] to that pitiless climate in the depth of winter would have been awful. One of the members, whose night it was to read off the meteorological instruments, carelessly left a lighted candle in his bunk close to the wall. The wall caught fire, and in a few seconds the whole bunk was wrapped in flame and dense smoke filled the room.9

Fortunately, the smoke woke the men before it asphyxiated them, and they succeeded in extinguishing the flames, ‘but not before a fair amount of damage had been done’.10

Following this accident, the extra fire precautions adopted by Borchgrevink included the preparation of ten knapsacks of provisions to be picked up by the men if they evacuated the hut in another emergency. When added to a cache of food, clothing, fuel and equipment left at the foot of Cape Adare, these would enable the men to survive until the return of the Southern Cross from Australia in the spring. There could be little doubt that a winter under canvas, or in makeshift shelters, would be profoundly challenging and unpleasant, but later expeditions – particularly the Hope Bay contingent of Otto Nordenskjöld’s Swedish Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04, the Northern Party of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition of 1910–13, and the Advance Party of Fuchs’ Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1956–58 – would prove that it was at least possible.

The introduction of these and similar measures by later expeditions, including, whenever possible, the construction of a provisioned refuge hut and the rostering of night watches, resulted in much more effective management of fire risk in the Antarctic. Of course, many of the early explorers were sailors who understood the dangers of fire at sea, particularly in wooden-hulled vessels, and the adoption of the necessary safety precautions seems to have met with very little resistance. Night duties also provided time for reading and for the sort of quiet, solitary reflection that otherwise proved so difficult in a hut filled with active young men, and many expedition diaries refer to the oasis-like tranquillity of these hours, when a man might sit ‘with a leg thrust into each oven, while the amateur washing dripped on to the red hot stove’.11

Certainly, the tactics proved effective, because the first fatal fire in Antarctica did not occur until 1948 – nearly half a century after Borchgrevink’s narrowly averted disaster. The site of that fire was Eagle House, the first permanent British shore station to be established on the Antarctic Peninsula, built by the personnel of Operation Tabarin at Hope Bay in February 1945.

* * *

Roughly 3km wide and 5km deep, Hope Bay cuts into the very tip of the peninsula’s northern coastline and it had long been considered Operation Tabarin’s primary destination. Jimmy Marr, who landed during a preliminary reconnaissance in early 1944, thought it a ‘most delightful place’,12 and its attractions and benefits are immediately apparent to any visitor.

When viewed from the sea, its foreground is defined by a patch of stony ground, about 1.5 square kilometres in extent and stained pink with the ordure of 60,000 penguins. Behind this rocky beach lies a wall of dramatic, jagged black mountains, its hollows and crevices packed with snow. Two of these mountains, in particular, dominate the scene: on the left, or south-east, lies a wide snow-filled basin with a rocky rim, named Mount Flora by Gunnar Andersson of Nordenskjöld’s expedition. Its counterpart, to the south-west, is a great round-shouldered hill named Mount Taylor, its looming brow more often than not topped with cloud, or with the streaming plumes of drift snow that indicate the onset of a blizzard. Between the two, Depot Glacier sweeps down towards a narrow inlet at the head of the bay, while, further to the right, Blade Ridge gives way to low ice cliffs, broken by a series of nunataks that resemble, in the words of one later resident, ‘black rock teeth with cavities stopped with glacial silver’.13

Most important of all, the site offers relatively easy access to the sea ice of Crown Prince Gustav Channel, which separates James Ross Island and Vega Island from the east coast of Graham Land. Dazzled by the benign aspect of this landscape, David James, Assistant Surveyor with Operation Tabarin, wrote that it ‘was all so utterly unlike any conceptions we had of the Antarctic even at its best that we all thought Hope Bay to be a land flowing with milk and honey. Yet it must be savage enough in winter.’14

A shore party under expedition leader Andrew Taylor chose as the site for Eagle House a spot to the south of a rocky promontory known as Seal Point. Lying at the toe of the massive sheet of inland ice, some 8m above sea level and 1km inland, it consisted of two level areas of moraine, each about 30m square and divided during the summer months by a swift-flowing glacial stream. The advantages were obvious: located some distance from the noisome penguin colonies, the site gave ready access to the glacier for sledgers; during the summer months the glacial stream provided a source of fresh water; and, at the shore, a 2m-high ice foot served as a natural jetty for offloading supplies and equipment from the ship.15

The expedition’s main building, which Taylor and his team completed in April, was roomy, if not luxurious. At its centre stood two prefabricated wooden huts, each 5m by 11.5m, which the expedition’s highly skilled carpenter, Lewis ‘Chippy’ Ashton, joined together to create a mess room, bedrooms and a workroom. To these, he then added a number of sizeable extensions which housed the galley, storerooms, an engine room for the radio generator, toilets, a laboratory and a carpenter’s workshop.

In order to keep the interior warm, two stoves were located in the galley, with additional heaters in the mess, laboratory, survey room and bathhouse. Unfortunately, as Taylor recognised, while this large number of heaters enabled the maintenance of a comfortable ambient temperature, they also increased the risk of fire. Moreover, while the expedition had been provided with four fire extinguishers, they were not particularly well suited to Antarctic conditions. ‘They were of the large cylindrical foaming water-filled type,’ Taylor remarked wryly:

… on which was printed in bold letters ‘Protect from Freezing’. We did the best we could in this respect, but there must have been numerous occasions in the night, after the fires were allowed to die and the temperature dropped, when their service would have been most questionable.16

In order to mitigate the risks, Taylor appointed Bill Flett, his second in command, as ‘fire chief’, responsible for inspecting the stoves every night before lights-out, and for ‘giving us occasional talks on certain precautions he wanted us to take’.17 In addition, they stored a selection of bedding, clothing, rations and radio equipment in a Nissen hut built a short distance away, along with copies of the expedition’s precious scientific and survey reports. In the event of a fire, these precautions, they hoped, would give them ‘a reasonable chance of replacing a part of our loss, and existing until the spring for a relief ship to arrive’.18

The preventative measures introduced by Taylor and Flett worked well, and the only accidental fire that the personnel of Operation Tabarin experienced during their two years in the Antarctic occurred not at Hope Bay, but at Base B, on Deception Island, when one of its two generators caught fire, probably as a result of a stray spark from a loose electrical connection igniting petrol vapour in the engine room. The flames destroyed the generator, but there were no casualties and the wireless officer, Tommy Donnachie, quickly restored communications.19

In Taylor’s opinion, the expedition as a whole had been lucky, for he had little doubt that, if a fire had started, Eagle House would have become a death trap. In 1947, a year after his return from the Antarctic, he wrote:

Had a fire ever caught the building in which we were living, there would have been little or no chance of extinguishing it in the high winds which so generally prevailed, and its entire contents would have been destroyed completely.20

His remarks would prove tragically prescient.

* * *

Between August and December 1945, Taylor’s party had completed sledging journeys totalling some 1,300km along the eastern shore of Graham Land and in the vicinity of James Ross Island, but much remained to be done – in particular, the forging of routes up onto the mountainous peninsula itself. This was the work inherited by Operation Tabarin’s civilian successor, the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS).

On one FIDS expedition, in November 1948, Base Leader Frank Elliott and three companions set out from Hope Bay to explore the coastline between Cape Kater and Cape Roquemaurel. They made good progress, and by 18 November they had reached a point 457m above sea level inland from Cape Kjellman, the eastern entrance to Charcot Bay, which divides the Trinity Peninsula from the Davis Coast.

But Elliott was becoming increasingly concerned at his inability to establish contact with the three-man party left at Eagle House. Throughout most of the journey he had spoken with the base daily, passing weather reports and receiving messages from the Governor of the Falkland Islands, but then, ‘quite suddenly, they went off the air’.21 Elliott later admitted that, initially, he hadn’t been particularly troubled by the break in communications, thinking that ‘either the radio equipment had gone wrong temporarily or a generator had gone out of action. We knew they had duplicates, so it would come in again.’22 But the silence remained unbroken.

On the evening of the 18th, he consulted ‘Bunny’ Fuchs, the recently appointed FIDS field commander then undertaking a journey through George VI Sound on the western edge of the peninsula, and over the radio they agreed that Elliott’s party should immediately return to base. Of course, defective equipment and atmospheric interference often interrupted radio signals, but, as Fuchs himself admitted, a few days previously he had been deeply shocked to learn that Eric Platt, the 22-year-old base leader at Admiralty Bay, had died of a heart attack, and this event might well have increased his desire to understand the cause of the prolonged silence at Hope Bay.