Edmund Hillary's defiant South Pole dash

Saturday, 3 January 2015

Casual jaunt: Sir Edmund Hillary was never meant to reach the South Pole in 1958. Instead, he had been ordered to drop off supplies for a British expedition, but the Everest conqueror had ideas of his own.

He is arguably the greatest of all New Zealanders, but Sir Edmund Hillary - driving a Massey Ferguson tractor - briefly became the most hated man in England.

On January 4, 1958, Hillary - who had five years earlier been the first to conquer Mt Everest - led a dash across Antarctica to become only the second team to reach the South Pole overland.

He was never meant to be there. All he was supposed to do was drop food supplies for a coming Vivian Fuchs-led British expedition.

For the Brits, the expedition was supposed to be some sort of extremely late salve for being beaten when a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the pole on December 14, 1911.

In doing so, they snatched the title from Brit Robert Falcon Scott, who led a party to the pole only to find the Norwegian flag already flying there. The defeated explorers died on their return journey.

In some measure, the Fuchs-led British expedition was meant to right that perceived wrong. Hillary's role was to drop off supplies, a full 800 kilometres away from the pole.

In 2007, he described his order-defying dash for the pole as the action of 'a somewhat bloody-minded youngish man'.

'I decided to follow my judgment. My judgment said, 'I'll push on and see if we can find the pole', which we were duly successful in doing.

'This wasn't appreciated altogether by my committee in Wellington, nor by the overall committee in London. In fact, one newspaper wrote that the most hated man in England at that moment was Ed Hillary.

'Well, I didn't mind. They were out there and we'd made a great journey and it was successful, so we were pretty happy.'

The Americans had already set up a base at the pole, though they had not got there by land.

Having travelled almost 800km across some of the world's most inhospitable terrains, with a broken sextant, Hillary had started to doubt - ever so slightly - his navigation.

'There was doubt in my mind that we might not be heading in the right direction but finally, when we'd been travelling quite a long time - driving and driving and going on forever, it seemed - and then I decided to stop for a rest.

'So we stopped the vehicles for a rest. I was in the lead tractor and I stood up in the tractor and looked ahead and, to my astonishment, I saw little flags waving.

'Well, I knew that meant people, and I knew the only people around here were [at] the American pole station.

'So we went to bed for a while and the next day we headed off towards the flags. We saw two vehicles coming out to meet us and they were the base leader and his assistant. They warmly welcomed us and drove us in honour, as it were, into the pole station.

'Well, it was quite thrilling for us. I remember the warmth of the welcome from our American friends. One said, 'You're probably hungry. Would you like a steak meal?'

'We said, 'We sure would'. We hadn't had anything like steak for a long time so we had a delicious meal of steak.'

After the steak, they watched a cowboy film and waited for the arrival of Fuchs' team, which duly came.

'I suppose there was nothing much he could do, so we shook hands in a very friendly fashion and carried on with our work,' Hillary said.

'However, Bunny [Fuchs] did get it back. I travelled with the crossing party and they had very impressive snowmobiles - not like our little Ferguson tractors - but they only had two seats in the front.

'I was put in the completely blacked-out back compartment and it was only when we got lost, which we did on the odd occasion, that Bunny would call to me, 'Open the door, would you, and find out where we are.'

'Of course, I was happy to do this and I didn't have too much trouble finding the route.

'Then came the moment I resented slightly, I have to admit, and that was when we started off again and Bunny gestured at the back of the snowmobile and said, 'OK, get aboard and let's head off.'

'So I got into the darkness and lay there for hour after hour while Bunny drove - until they got lost again. Then I'd get out, duly find where we were without too much difficulty.

'Those many hours, lying in the back of the snowmobile, weren't some of the happiest days on the expedition.'