Excerpt taken from The Crossing of Antarctica

by Sir Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary

Although it had never officially been part of our plan, I had nurtured private hopes even before we left New Zealand that it might be possible to take some vehicles south on the trail with us. The excellent performance of our Ferguson tractors in unloading the ships had made this idea seem more realistic, and the various modifications to the vehicles carried out by Bates and Ellis had improved their performance in soft snow to a considerable extent. I was anxious to give the modified tractors a thorough try-out under conditions more camparable to a southern journey, so decided to repeat by tractor the route covered on foot by Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard in their amazing Worst Journey in the World. This would entail crossing the Ross Ice Shelf from Scott Base to Cape Crozier at the eastern tip of Ross Island - a round trip of about a hundred miles. A satisfactory performance by the Fergusons would remove another burden from my mind, for it would give us a strong second line of support in our depot-establishing operations and enable us virtually to guarantee their establishment even if something unforeseen occurred to the Beaver - always a possible risk when landings were being made in out-of-the-way spots, and where the aircraft was operating heavily overloaded in extreme weather conditions at maximum ranges.

On Tuesday, 19th March, Ellis, Bates, Mulgrew and I left Scott Base with two tractors and four laden sledges. In bad visibility and deep soft snow we fumbled our way through the pressure ridges and crevasses, and then across the 'windless bight' in the shadow of Mount Erebus. Our progress was very laborious, and it took us two days to cover the first twenty-five miles. We carried out various experiments with sledges and repaired and modified the track mechanism on our Fergusons. This enabled progress to be made under conditions that would normally have bogged us down. On the third day, we dcame to an end of the soft snow and reached much firmer going. We raced around Cape Mackay and along the trough between the walls of mount Terror and the broken pressure ice of the Ross Ice Shelf. Our fears of large crevasses were fortunately not fulfilled, and at no stage did we break through the lid of anything more than two feet wide. In the dim light of evening we scratched our way up a long icy slope to a snowy shelf at the foot of the 'Knoll' which crowns Cape Crozier. Here we established a camp and occupied it for several days in continuously windy weather with cold temperatures and drifting snow.

Our main interest was to search for the remains of the stone hut built by Wilson's party and where they had spent so many hard and difficult days. After some unsuccessful searching, we finally found it - four low rock walls without any roof, half-filled with snow and ice. Thrusting above the top was the framework of a manhauling sledge chafed by nearly half a century of wind and drift, but still in excellent condition. We dug the ice out of the hut and uncovered many interesting relics - some of Wilson's drawing pencils, test tubes, thermometers, unexposed film, a blubber stove, a heary pick-axe, and the skins and blubber from Emperor penguins. As we worked, the wind whistled around us and we found it difficult to understand why they had chosen such an exposed spot when more suitable ones were readily available near at hand.

Sir Edmund Hillary is the father of Peter Hillary. In 1953 he, together with Norgay Tenzing, were the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary also drove a tractor to the South Pole during the summer of 1957/58. Peter and his father will be the first father and son to reach the South Pole over land.