Land of the Long Day

1 – Up McMurdo Sound by Dog Sled, 1955

I substituted "He shot Tom McEvoy....!" into the old Australian ballad, to Tom's great pretended indignation and I rolled up my shirtsleeves in the warm glow of the sun; so much for "The Land of the Blizzard". The pressure ridges were far enough apart to give easy travelling and a few inches of snow covered the usually gritty sea‑ice, seals lay along well‑used dive holes along the pressure ridges and skuas circled. I have since sledded up and down the Sound many times but never again with such a perfect surface and rarely in such perfect weather.
Soon the problems of being part of a military expedition appeared. Sgt Tom McEvoy had great experience of polar travel, but being an enlisted man (or, Lower Deck) could not give advice unless asked. Baker and Tuck, being officers, did not ask, myself being a mere civilian and a Colonial at that, had few such inhibitions and quickly worked out a solution to the dilemma. "What do you think, Tom?" I would say waving at the straining, diminutive dogs, "Think they need a rest?"
"Poor little beggars is all tuckered out!" he would mutter in reply.
"Dave, how about a spell? I think the dogs need it!"
Need it? Never before or since have I seen animals so totally exhausted as they were after ten hours, but they showed great spirit. To the cries of "Gee" and "Haw" (which strange words come from mule drivers or maybe bullockies), they kept going, their claws digging into the ice on the hard patches, straining at loads at least twice too heavy even for fit dogs. After seventeen miles we were nearing Cape Royds and the suggestion was floated that we camp. We were in sight of the wide tide crack we had been told of and, while I didn't know much about sea‑ice, camping on the wrong side of cracks ten miles long did carry with it a spectacle of floating gaily off to sea a la Doctor Grenfell.
"Like hell!" I said firmly, "Let's cross over.." We were about a mile from the jutting rock of Cape Royds on which, as yet invisible, is the 1907 hut of Sir Ernest Shackleton. I would have been vastly happier to have camped on solid ground but mountains of chaotic pressure ice lay between. Later we were to find an easy approach from the southern side of the cape, but for now, concluding that seventeen miles of ice was not likely to vanish overnight, we camped. That is, the decision to camp was made but nothing much actually happened. Camp to me means putting up tents, so I dragged them out. They were Meade type and designed by Bernt Balchen and Finn Ronne, son of Martin Ronne, Amundsen's sailmaker. They were single layer, light weight and white with an orange stripe along the ridge, too bright to sleep in, impossible to heat, and a death trap in a blow, or so I was to conclude when two years older and wiser. Only after I had pitched the two of them side by side did McEvoy gently point out that they were meant to be placed end to end and zip together. The aluminium tent pegs shattered against the hard sea‑ice and two years later I would no more have camped on hard ice covered by a bare inch or two of snow than I would have camped on the water!

The air was still and I set up the cook‑stoves outside. Unfortunately they were meant to burn kero and we had been given petrol, but having battled primuses before I coaxed out enough heat to warm some cans of the awful junk the US Army supplies as food, mostly little cans of spaghetti with perhaps about 10% of the fat and protein one needs sledging on the ice, C‑Rations being designed for the tropics.
Dave Baker meanwhile set up the radio to find no aerials were included, in any case transmit it did not. I can still hear his voice repeating, "Generate, Generate, this is Generate Four, Generate Four, how do you read, over!" to be greeted by silence, not even static. Again, a year or so later I would have rigged an aerial from a wire dog trace suspended on ski‑poles or something, but it takes experience to get inventive!
The dogs meanwhile, were regarding the heavy canned dog‑food with some distaste.
"They need a bit of fresh meat," said I. I walked over to a large Weddell seal lying along by a diving hole and dispatched him with the ice‑axe. He weighed about half a ton and it seemed obvious that an animal with such a thick hide ought to be skinned. I waded in with my heavy skinning knife in much the way I skinned deer, and got liberally sprayed in blood from the many blood‑vessels in the blubber for my pains. Later I learnt that seals being highly vascular, need bleeding first, though when old Cap'n Black later listened to my account of the problem and said "We used to cut them up with an axe!", it sounded a bit unlikely. The dogs tucked away about 20lb of seal meat apiece and yelled for more so feeding seal seemed the right approach.
I sat in the cold tent and thoughtfully wrote up a list of "what not to do's" in my diary. The next day the poor dogs were in bad straits with cut paws, exhaustion, and just possibly, overeating. We made barely three miles before giving up, crossing another narrower crack with only a couple of feet of surging black water, but another foot or two of crumbling ice lined each side, enough to carry the weight of a dog, but which gave way before I could hop and skip clear! This time I pitched the tents in line and cooked in the zipped‑up area between tents, fortunately because rising wind began picking up the fine snow like heavy smoke and the snow drift built up in the lee. It was not only the dogs that could do with a rest as we had walked or trotted the whole way, occasionally standing on a sled runner. After the first lunch-break I changed from heavy boots to light American mukluks, which had canvas up to the knee with leather soles and a felt liner and which were warmer and lighter. One does not need heavy cold boots on flat snow-covered sea-ice.

A helicopter windmilled in to check why no radio skeds and was back in an hour with a new radio, this time with aerials. The obliging pilot even took Baker and I up on a recce and we hung out the cargo door picking a route through the pressure. It was my first‑ever chopper flight and I soon concluded that the fewer hours in this kind of transport the better the chances of longevity. Helicopters in that era had great difficulty getting off the ground and could not land above about 3000ft.
A Weasel, driven by Cmdr. Whitney on his second pass up the Sound stopped by with bad news. 'Trigger' Hawkes, another ex 'High Jump' pilot with long photo‑reconnaissance missions behind him had taken over the controls of one of our four de Havilland Otters which was about to take off with a load of fuel drums from the ships to Hut Point. Another pilot, Ski Scilenski, had been sent to Canada to train in flying the single‑engined ski‑equipped Otter. As Ski later told me, "Old Trigger just took his cigar out of his mouth and said, 'OK, Boy, I'll take her..'." Hawkes had three bars on his sleeve and Ski only one, so friend Ski moved over. Unfortunately Trigger was not aware that the Otter's tail trim was still set for landing and did not check. The Otter climbed steeply, Ski, guessing the plane was about to go over on its back, knocked the throttle shut saving the lives of several men lying on top of the fuel drums. Commander Oliver, in charge of Photo Reconnaissance was standing behind the pilots and went out through the windscreen breaking a hip, but Lt. Dick Bowers in charge of construction of the new Base to go at Hut Point was fortunately not hurt. And so we lost the first of the four Otters, and Trigger was grounded.

On the third day we passed within a mile or so of Cape Evans and saw Scott's old 1910 hut partly buried in snow. We were almost opposite Inaccessible Island when the sound of aeroplane engines was heard, and a red‑tailed four engined Skymaster appeared through the low overcast and began to circle, the first plane ever to fly into the Antarctic Continent had arrived!
The Seebees had flagged a barely distinguishable landing strip on the sea‑ice and as the approaching plane failed to find it, and radio contact failed if I remember correctly and a chopper went up waggling tail‑rotors or whatever choppers waggle to say "Follow Me!" and guided them in. Soon we scrambled up into an almost bare cabin to welcome the two grinning pilots, Hank Jorda, short, fair and Swedish, and John Donovan, tall dark and Irish handsome. They had less than an hour's fuel left and inhospitable as the scene outside may have appeared, they were understandably pleased to be with us!
"And here we sit," said Hank cheerfully, "Till they bring us some gas!" The smaller DC‑3's had run short of fuel and turned back after head winds, but a second four‑engined DC‑4 arrived within 30 minutes and the next day two twin‑engined P2V bombers, which were to be used for photographic missions. We slept on airmattresses in the Skymaster's cabin that night and next day loading some of the heavier gear on an obliging Weasel, we were soon rounding Hut Point and spanning the dogs beside the old hut of Scott's 1903 'Discovery' Expedition. Three army bell tents, doubled layered, complete with mosquito netting, were already pitched and Baker and Tuck formally reported to Lt. Richard Bowers, the Seabee in charge of construction of what was to be an American base, on New Zealand territory, and a political problem ever since.
Two Alaskan geologists from the "Glacier", Bob Forbes and Howard Parker were already in residence having elected to fly in, in cowardly fashion, by helicopter (though it might be argued that their method required more courage than a mere 40‑mile run.)
Two Oceanographers were constructing a topo‑map of the area, and it was undeniably, as Baker had said, "A miserable hole!" Jet black slopes of shattered lava pocked with snow and ice patches rose a few hundred feet to Harbour Heights and, further back, to Crater Hill, while south half a mile away rose the yellow and brown trachyte slopes of Observation Hill surmounted by a massive jarrah cross in memory of Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Evans. The whole area lies at the southwestern end of a ten‑mile long peninsular formed of a chain of small ruined volcanoes, none being above a thousand feet or so high and a couple of miles wide at most. I walked across bare black sand and scree slopes onto Hut Point itself where a smaller cross stood in memory of Vince who slipped into the sea in 1903. A New Zealander, Hare, missed a similar fate by inches. The south wind blew coldly over the bleak rocks, and though seventy miles to west lay the magnificent blue‑barred Royal Society Range, the local scene could only be called desolate. However, time was to show that a cold site has advantages, thawing ice creates more problems that ever does cold snow.
"Hey there, Bernie!" said Forbes, the University of Alaska geologist the next day as I emerged from a Bell tent into the glare of daylight. "Come and give an opinion on something!"
With Dick Bowers, Howard Parker, Walter Sullivan,(a correspondent) and a Seebee carrying a bundle of what proved to be gelignite, we walked a few hundred yards across the ice of Discovery Bay and up onto a flattish gravel‑covered area that lay between Harbour Heights and Observation Hill. It was covered in thaw pools in which a few skua gulls played, and curious little trenches that formed a hexagonal network, each hexagon being a few yards across.
"Permafrost patterned ground," said Forbes with some authority. "The water in the surface soil freezes and expands, and then thaws and shrinks and leaves marginal trenches in the soil."
"What I want to know," said Bowers in worried fashion, "Is, can I build a base around here and if so where? If we put a hut here will it be moved around when the ground freezes again?"
Forbes gave us a discourse on the effects of frost heaving, on which, both as a geologist and a resident of Fairbanks, Alaska, he had more that a little knowledge. It was, he said, extremely difficult to bulldoze and had an enormous power to absorb explosive blasting.
"We had better see that!" said Bowers and gave an order. The Seabee set off a shaped charge of six plugs of Gelly which blew the wet gravel off an area a yard across and six inches deep! Below that the stones were set in a concrete‑like matrix of ice and reflected the blast, ice having enormous ability to absorb shock and it seemed that Forbes had understated the problem.
"What do I do?" demanded Bowers in some exasperation, "I can't dig into that stuff, and I can't build on it. If it melts the hut foundations will collapse, if it freezes, the huts will tip over."
"Drain it!" said I with some impatience. Americans always seemed to take a hell of a time to come to obvious conclusions. "Get the D2 up here and push a drain through this ridge and drain that big thaw pool. When it thaws a bit more you can cut the drain a bit deeper. Put a line of huts along the dry ridge here above the thaw water and when the permafrost has melted down a few feet, more over there. It can't freeze again unless you let the water build up."
Forbes and Parker agreed, and Bowers sent for the D2 which was able to cut a shallow drainage channel a mere foot or two deep through the low ridge , and melt‑water flooded down to the sea. When I last saw it, that drain was a gully about fifteen or twenty feet deep! I wonder how many people who have visited Antarctica's largest city know that Main Street was located along the edge of a thaw pool? There was ultimately little problem with frost‑heaving because the bed‑rock was not far below in most places, a fact that with a few more years experience, I would have wanted to know before giving free advice! However thawing of subsurface ice wedges causes problems to this day on the "streets" as an area a few yards across will collapse and fill with water but foundations are now set so deep that they remain below the level of summer thaw.
The Mobile Construction Battalion began erecting the first hut on the gravel ridge the very next day as tractor trains arrived with materials. Steel trusses were laid on timber pads, then a plywood floor, the pre‑fab insulated wall panels were clamped together and then raised, and then the flat roof was laid. It took two days for eight men to erect a sixty by twenty hut. The timber pads may well have had to be relevelled occasionally but the huts were to last twenty years or more, though all have now gone to be replaced by two and three story buildings set on piles drilled down into the Permafrost and into bed‑rock.
I was surprised how little fuss the construction crews made about working with the sun gone behind murk, a freezing wind and skiffs of snow, not knowing that the weather was typical for winter conditions for much of North America. Compared to a Canadian winter, it was incredibly mild! A large marquee mess‑tent was put up on the snow by Scott's hut and enormous twenty‑ton sleds drawn by D4 tractors appeared. At chow breaks the construction workers filed the best part of a quartermile down from the base‑site to the Mess Tent, and it added up to about thirty man‑hours a day. I had another bright idea.
"Look, Dick", I said. "Why don't we move the Mess Tent up by the hut site ? Look at all the time it would save!"
"Good idea!" he said enthusiastically, and the big marquee was struck, loaded onto a sled and re‑erected on rather muddy gravel on the edge of the building site. It was, I thought, miles better than trying to eat with your feet in a foot of soft snow and infinitely better for the cooks.
"You hear the news?" asked Forbes the next day. "Bowers just got his ass kicked in by the Admiral!"
"Why, for God's sake?" said I surprised. "Dick's doing a great job." "It's that Marquee, Admiral doesn't like it cluttering up the job site." "Sorry, Dick," I said contritely when I had searched him out. "Me and my bright ideas!"
"No strain," said the imperturbable Bowers. "Admiral's got to prove they still control things sometimes or they get worried!" And the Mess Tent came back down to Discovery Hut.
In the evenings Forbes, Parker and I climbed Observation Hill to gaze over the hazed snow plains towards the Pole, to hammer on rocks collecting samples, and set up a slalom course on the icy snow slopes. I saw little of Baker, Tuck and McEvoy who set up a camp a little apart and looked after the dogs. Apparently they were to stand by in case of a rescue mission. Later I was to be sorry that I had not spent more time with them exercising the dogs, we both could have learnt a great deal.
I began another little after‑hours recreation scheme which was to open up the old Discovery Hut which stood four‑square, black and rather forbidding and half buried in snow only fifty yards away. Opening the door showed a passage way blocked with snow drift, the ceiling festooned with enormous frost crystals. To begin with snow blocks could be cut out easily but after about ten feet became almost solid ice. I tried to talk Bowers into putting some men onto the project so the hut could be used, but he was reluctant to interfere with what was after all a historical relic of sorts. On Xmas Eve, the wind rose and soon a full blizzard was blowing clouds of drift and we struggled to hold down the cumbersome tents and replace flaps blown out by the wind. The radio in Bower's command tent crackled.
"I'm in a Weasel about four miles north of The Point." said a voice plaintively. "I can't see a thing. What do I do?" Bowers looked at one of Byrd's old expedition members who had joined us.
"Tell him to head straight south into the wind", said he, grandly. Startled, Bowers looked at me.
"Straight into the nearest tide crack, more like!" said I, as an explosive hiccup came from Forbes.
"Right on!" said Bowers. He spoke into the microphone "Stay where you are till it clears!"
"Yessir!" said the voice in which was a tinge of relief. Outside in the gloom of the whirling drift, Forbes yelled with laughter and rolled in the snow hysterically. He staggered to his knees giving an odd impression of being buried to the waist and melodramatically pointed South with a large trail mitt, the wolverine fur on his green Army parka and the snow almost concealing his bearded face.
"Wasn't that beautiful?" he gasped. "Straight into the wind! My God, miss the Point by five yards and straight on to the nearest crevasse, first stop South Pole! Oh God, where do we find such clowns?"
People continued to arrive and the tent‑town grew. Paul Siple, the famous 'Sea Scout Siple' of Byrd's old 1927 and other Polar Expeditions, turned up, as jovial as ever, and with his usual enthusiasm was soon engaged in all kinds of unusual research projects. He set up a Wild T3 theodolite near the Point and stared at a marker out on the ice.
"I know it sounds crazy," said he, "But it does look as though this place has only one tide a day." After a couple days Siple was recalled to the ships and I inherited the theodolite. I took hourly readings dashing down between bouts of unpacking twenty‑ton sleds . When I plotted them up, the tides slowly changed from one tide a day when the moon was in maximum or minimum declination, to two tides when the moon was about the equator. It is all quite logical when I thought about it a bit, and later found that the same results were obtained by Nelson with Scott's Expedition. I tried turning the powerful telescope on Mount Lister and calculated it's height from log tables. Try how I would, and that machine read to a seconds of arc, the height of that mighty but distant mountain , came to only seven thousand feet. Yet Scott had made it over 13000. Then I remembered an elementary fact, our old earth is curved, not flat, and a correction for curvature brought the height to a little over 13000 feet and for days I felt quite smug with my cleverness!
All this was frightfully interesting but not getting me much further ahead with finding possible sites for a New Zealand base or routes up onto polar plateaus which so far I had not seen. To do that I needed an aeroplane so I went the rounds of various senior officers, saying, "Gimme an Otter!" At that stage we still had three left. Commander Whitney who seemed to turn up at unexpected moments grilled me on this, why did I need an Otter especially, what valleys did I want to look at, how many hours flying time etc etc. I couldn't admit to the truth, which was that the Otter looked a neat little plane, and I could get Ski Scilenski as pilot, (who seemed a sensible young man), it was a British aircraft, and could land and takeoff on any snow patch, a facility not a single American aircraft then had. I also knew, with my RNZAF background, that in the war the Americans never built a bomber that was a patch on the Mosquito or the Lanc, nor a fighter that could touch the Spitfire, Typhoon or the Beau and I simply had more faith in British aircraft. Once, with my customary lack of tact, I said so.
"What about the Mustang?" said an Air Force officer, triumphantly. "Designed to specifications laid down by the same team that designed the Spitfire and built under licence, originally given an Allison engine and was a flop, re‑engined with the Packard Merlin and was the best long-range fighter used both over Germany and in the Pacific!" said I.
"I've got you right there," said the officer, Americans at that time still having the rather naive belief that America made the best of everything. "Down below I have a book on the history of every airplane ever made an Ah'm gonna prove you wrong!" He was back in a few minutes. "Goddammit!" he said ruefully, "Ah was sure that plane was American designed too!"
New Year's Eve came and bonfires were lit in the snow. Secret stores of alcohol appeared and some of the men got quite drunk. I watched with interest the way Bowers laughed and joked with the men and yet remained that touch apart. Discipline was much less obvious than in the Royal Navy or the N.Z. Armed forces and yet there was never doubt it was there. "This may be a hell of a work site ," hiccuped a SeeBee Petty Officer, "But we got us damn‑good officers, I'll tell the world, yessir!" Tensions at the construction site grew, mainly between Navy, Airforce, Seebees and civilians.
"You're the only damn' civilian here who works," said Bowers, rather bitterly. "And they expect us to feed them. Damned if I don't send some of them back to the ships!" Trigger Hawkes sat on a box in the sun in his bright blue Airforce parka, reading "Voyage of the Discovery".
"Off the butt, Trigger," I said , staggering past, crate on shoulder. "Dick is getting a bit uptight!"
Hawkes waved a cigar. "Hell with him," he said briefly. "He brings down two hundred MCB's and then wants the Airforce to build his damn' base? Now look at this. Do you know those old boys had the old 'Discovery' for three years right there!", pointing with cigar to the snow a few yards away. The fifty‑year old print was indeed identical to the scene before us to the last snow patch. Only the 'Discovery' herself with her massive yards seemed to have miraculously vanished.
The Word finally filtered down. "Admiral wants you to do some photo‑recce flying on the DC‑4's as observer or something," said Bowers, as calm and unhurriedly efficient as ever. "I'll send a Weasel to pick you in half an hour." I often wonder what happened to Bowers who also later built the Pole Station. By now he is probably a short General or whatever Seebees become.

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