Our aircraft runway, which was a huge great floating piece of ice, started to move because the wind had changed, and we were 12 hours later than we should have been. That created a certain amount of pressure on the hull of the ship. But at first we weren't too worried, and we'd we'd been in many similar situations, got out fine. But this time just felt somehow a little bit different. The ice was a little bit harder, and there were some rather strange sounds coming from the inside of the ship. Creaking sounds. Over the next few hours, things got a little bit more concerning, and it capped off with me hearing for the first time in my life that message that you hear in movies and things. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. And then we heard it, which was the sound of the the air coming out of the ship. It reared up until it went down stern first, and then the bow went right up into the into this pointing towards the sky.
SPEAKER_01Hi everyone, I'm Dan Smith, co-host on Thin Ice. And you just heard William Fenton describe events from January 11, 1986. That's when the converted icebreaker Southern Quest became trapped in rapidly shifting ice flows around Antarctica. This is part two of that story. In part one, we explored Robert Swann's plan to mount the first private expedition to the South Pole in the modern era and how William was the first person who volunteered to help. They called this expedition in the footsteps of Scott because they were retracing the route of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's fateful and ultimately fatal South Pole expedition in 1912. The quick summary is that in February of 1985, Southern Quest delivered five people to Antarctica's Cape Evans. Robert Swan, Roger Meir, Gareth Woods, John Tolson, and Dr. Michael Stroud then spent the Antarctic winter in a hut surrounded by 24-hour darkness. When the sun returned nearly a year later, Robert, Roger, and Gareth began a 900-mile unassisted march to the pole, pulling 80 days of supplies behind them. In part one, William and Rob talked about acquiring and outfitting Southern Quest. William also shared how Southern Quest became trapped in pack ice when they were forced to return to Antarctica earlier than planned for reasons that shall become clear in a moment. Let's jump right into part two with this question about the ship's crew. Robert will respond first, and then William. Before we get to what happened next, I wanted to ask a little bit about who was on board, because this was no joy ride down to the Southern Ocean. You had recruited and trained a proper crew. I think it was 21 people who were on the return trip to the Antarctic, and everyone either had extensive naval experience or or they had hefty training. How did you recruit and how did you prepare crew for what faced them on the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic coast?
SPEAKER_00I think when we began, uh obviously you can't pay people, so you've got to get people that are willing to give up their time. So uh we found the most brilliant captain, Captain Phippin, who was ex-British Antarctic Survey. We had Captain John Tolson, who would be actually at Cape Evans, part of the expedition on the land. Again, a British Antarctic Survey sea captain. We had professional engineers, first officers. But obviously, to add to the numbers, we needed people like William Fenton who were going to be trained up to be totally professional on board Southern Quests. So maybe William, you can take it from there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, indeed. We did have these old, I guess you call them old sea dogs who were in charge of everything at the beginning. And a lot of them stayed all the way through. But at first we were very top-heavy on very experienced people. And that was great because we were able, over the course of quite a long time, remember this almost two years, we learnt a lot from them. Some of them were slightly at the end of their careers, should we say, and they were happy to share their knowledge. So we learned navigation, we learned how to keep an engine running 24 hours a day for five weeks, which is what we had to do on some of the legs going out from Britain. We learnt carpentry, we learnt welding, we learned things which are still used today, actually, always that grateful to Southern Quest. I think everybody who was on that boat came away with a lot more skill than when they arrived.
SPEAKER_01You worked in the engine room, William, aside from the fact that the engine room was warm in Antarctic waters. What was it that drew you to the engine room?
SPEAKER_02Well, I'd always been interested in mechanical things, motorbikes and so on. So for me it was an absolute dream to work alongside 60-year-old engineers who knew everything about engines. That's probably annoying them because asking them so many questions. But it was fantastic learning new stuff and applying it as well, because this is real life. I mean, you only have one engine on that kind of boat, and it has to keep going. But it's not like a car when you can call a recovery service in the middle of the ocean. So everything has to be perfect. And that's what I learned is just being so careful. I mean, we're getting to the Antarctic, you know, it's a serious, serious business.
SPEAKER_01And it was not a strictly male crew. You also had women who were on on board fulfilling various roles.
SPEAKER_02That's right. And they too were incredibly impressive. I mean, remember one of them was worked as a deck hand. My goodness, she was tough. She could lift the most amazing amount of weight. They were tough women, for sure.
SPEAKER_01Good to work with them. Let's talk a little bit about why a ship was necessary in the first place.
SPEAKER_00Well, first and foremost, uh our expedition by today's S would be kind of 17 million US dollars. Why? Today we can fly into Antarctica, actually curses me of Giles Kirchhour and and Kurtchore's wife, who set up the ability for expeditions to fly in. But back then, the only way you could go to Antarctica as a private expedition was to go buy ship. So that's why we had to buy the ship. Antarctica in the winter is surrounded by very, very thick, heavy pack ice. And obviously, we wanted to follow in the footsteps of Scott and Shackleton and Armondon and went to that area of the Antarctic, Cape Evans, um, at Murdo Sound. You've got to get your ship in, which we did uh in early 1985, in February, drop all our equipment off, ship leaves us as we described on episode one, and then hopefully the ship comes back a year later in February to collect it. So the plan was very simple that Captain John Kershaw organized a fantastic aeroplane to fly from South America to pick us up at the South Pole between January the 11th and January the 17th. Those were the days. Remember, we had 80 days of food and fuel. So we couldn't wait, we couldn't go any later. So the plan was he flies in, lands at the South Pole, picks us three up if we get there, and then slides us back to South America, allowing William and the team on Southern Quest to stand off Antarctica on board uh Southern Quest and wait for the ice to go away, come in, pick up the team at the uh John and Michael at the base camp, remove everything and leave Antarctica tidy. That was the plan. Then and remember, we're not the most popular people still when it comes to governments in the Antarctic because they didn't want private expeditions going there. They didn't want us to see quite a lot of the things they were doing that were wrong all those years ago at McMurdo Station with garbage and rubbish. I remember arriving at the South Pole and it stunk of jet aviation fuel. Things weren't quite up to spec. They are now, but they weren't then. And therefore, Giles was told he could not land his plane at the South Geographic Pole. Giles being Giles wasn't a person to be told no. He said, Well, you don't own Antarctica, I can land where I want. And then these people from the United States government, National Science Foundation, got on the telephone to the people who owned the aeroplane and said, And by the way, if you charter your plane to Giles Kirchhoff, then you will not get these National Science Foundation contracts up in the Arctic. So this moment, remember, we're in Antarctica, we're out of communications. This is when William and the team would turn Southern Quest into an aircraft carrier and take our own plane down to Antarctica to fly to the pole to collect us. The only problem with that was the ship would have to enter the Antarctic Perkice about a month earlier than they should have done because of the ice. That was the situation. Quite frankly, no one owns Antarctica. So we wanted to write up and say, we're gonna handle this on our own. Doesn't matter what you put obstacles in our path, we're gonna overcome them. That was the reason the ship on January the 11th was there in that position in the Antarctic.
SPEAKER_01So speaking of January 11th, and this one is directed to William, you had come down earlier than anticipated. You found a large ice flow. It was bigger than many football fields, and you created a runway on that ice flow, and things were okay for a while.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we had a runway and it was quite big. It had sandbags at the end just in case the plane couldn't stop in time, so it was all pretty safe and secure. Superb pilot Giles Kershaw, he was a real expert. Wheels had aircraft engineers from Alaska actually, who were used to operating aircraft in very cold conditions. So we had probably the world's best ice flying crew at the time there on with on the ship. So we were there and the plane took off, did several test flights. It was very exciting to see it take off and think we carried this in pieces, built it, and then it's flying around and circling around the ship. That was that was incredible. But as I think I mentioned last time, um we were delayed by a broken ski on one of the landings. It cracked a ski which needed fixing, and that took uh quite a few hours, 12 hours, and that that's the beginning of of what happened next.
SPEAKER_01Because at the end of that 12 hours the ice had started shifting and tramping the southern quest. Do you remember those moments?
SPEAKER_02I do remember we we'd been caught in ice many, many times before, uh, had no concerns whatsoever. Normally we just sort of reversed, rammed it again, and we'd go through. But this seemed like an awful lot of ramming going on. That was the first sign that seemed unusual. You know, it's a big boat, many tons, and it's smashing into ice, and so there's a lot of movement on board and a lot of noise as well, normally of ice running alongside the hull along the metal. So it's not a you might call a relaxing maneuver at the best of times, but this one was super unrelaxing because the boat wasn't moving. We weren't able to reverse it far enough to get a good ram. So then we started to do some things to free the ship. We actually got off the boat, some of us, with fire hoses, and the technique there is to use high pressure water where the ice is against the side of the ship and to sort of blast the ice away. And that kind of worked, along with some pretty frantic shoveling with hand shovels. And then we thought, okay, well, this is alright, this is stuck a bit fast, but we'll certainly get out like we all had before, but it would not move, it would not move. And uh the engines were revving hard, and the, you know, as you can imagine, there's quite noisy. And then we tried some other things, some other techniques, which we said at the beginning we had some very experienced Antarctic mariners on board, and we did some things that they knew, which, for example, we put some very heavy uh barrels into a net, put them up onto the crane, and then swing was swinging the crane across the deck many, many tons, to try and just oscillate to rock the ship to push it out of the ice, which you know could have could well have worked, I think. In this case, even then, that wasn't it wasn't the boat wasn't moving enough. And then we started using the winches on the boat, we attached it to some strong points on the ice, and we were trying to winch the boat out. We we tried pretty much everything. That was the I think the time that everyone was really seriously concerned. Some little things started happening, little signs of what was to come. Um on every boat there are railings to stop people falling overboard. And I remember standing on the stern on the back of the boat and looking down the sides of the boat and noticing the railings were not straight anymore. They were starting to flex, they weren't parallel. Just little things like that. I thought, no, no, no, no, this cannot this cannot be. Our boat, our our home for two years, this kind of enormous thing that we'd you know spent so much time and effort and money on and over their time, and it cannot be being damaged. It cannot be. But that was just the beginning, because after that we started hearing noises, things like hatch covers blowing open and some awful sounds from down below. I think uh everyone's seen Titanic, I think, the film. Um, and I would say it's a great film, but one thing that is not correct there is that when Kate Winsless is watching the water coming in, it's like blue water. It looks like a little spa, beautiful bubbly water coming up the corridors of the boat. This water, when it started appearing, was black and oily and nasty and cold, and the whole thing was pretty malevolent, really. So that's what I would say about a sinking ship is that it's it's extremely unpleasant because your your security is just being blown apart and the water becomes an enemy. And I remember seeing water because the hull was under compression and starting to split in certain bits, and down in the engine room, down below, so it was spraying in, and that spray was starting to go onto the electronics, onto the fuse board, which in turn started some small electrical fires. So we had some bit of smoke, got water coming in, got awful noises, and you can see the pictures building of something that isn't isn't exactly healthy. And in fact, there a crack opened up in the in the engine room. We had uh remember we said at the beginning we had some very experienced mariners, we had an Australian guy on board, super engineered, but he'd he was so experienced he'd been up uh, I think he'd been in the Vietnam War, going up the Mekong River in an American PT boat. So he'd been in some pretty serious situations before. But I remember saying to him, he was called Ted, and I said, uh how bad is it, Ted? Is it, you know, is this what how how about this crack? And he said, I ain't welding that. Fantastic Australian humour, you know, because it really was opening up and it was it was sinking for sure. If you're on a boat like that, doing an expedition, it's like a test flight into space, it's dangerous. You know, you know you've got to be prepared. But we'd had lots and lots of drills over the years for fire and all sorts of things. We had a great system called ABC Teams. A team fights the emergency, B team provides all the supplies and everything, A team needs to fight it, and C team, which I was in charge of, is preparing for the worst in case that doesn't work. So that was my job, and I was fixated on what I had to do, which in this case was getting everything off a ship that would support life afterwards. Life roughs. It meant food, it meant clothing, it meant water, it meant ropes, sledges, everything we could get, we were throwing onto the ice. And I just say one thing to everybody who flies on an aircraft is that I'm the only person on an aeroplane now who listens to the flight safety briefing. Everybody else is reading a book on their laptop. I actually watch it because I've been in that situation. The pilots of those 737 Boeing uh Maxis, which went down, had the same thing. I think it's called target fixation. Something goes wrong, they were seeing something on instrument panel, they were fixated by this problem because it was so unusual and not looking at the bigger picture. That's exactly what happened to me in spite of all that training we'd had, is I was obsessed with getting life robbed soft, and I remember the whole thing was closely real because we'd practiced it, and it was just so unbelievable that you're doing this for real. And it was a very, very strange, very strange sensation. So do look at the safety stuff because I promise you that when it happens, you are not yourself. You're in a tunnel, you're not thinking straight. So you have to have a routine to follow. How were others around you responding? Well, we were very concentrated, and in fact, there's a photograph of the ship going down with us standing on the ice and the ship going down. And what's interesting is that every single person is not looking at the ship, they're looking at the equipment that we've been sorting out because everyone is thinking about surviving, about the next step. You still have to concentrate because you know, you don't want to die. Although it was kind of exciting, it was also horrible. Horrible. And I've heard somewhere that if you want to avoid exposure and you get very cold, keep a full bladder. These kind of weird things, you know, it makes no sense at all survival-wise, but those are the kind of things that get in your head. So that's why you have to be a robot and do what the emergency drills tell you to do. Tell us about the moment that the ship actually disappeared into the water. We were really busy getting all the stuff together, and then we heard it, which was the sound of the the air coming out of the ship. It reared up until it went down stern first, and then the bow went right up into the into this pointing towards the sky, 45 degrees. The boat was obviously filling with water, that water came out bursting through the bridge windows, and then the boat slowly and then faster went down beneath the ice, seeing the bow, the red bow of it just disappearing. Total, total silence from everybody. It was uh absolute shock. You could almost hear everyone's heart beating, dry mouthed, watching this thing. There was some sort of outline of a boat in the ice. And it had gone. Our ship had gone. It was like watching your own house disappear into the ground. Can you imagine that that sensation? It was total shock. But then these two whales came, orco killer whales came up, surfaced in the hole where the ship had been. Obviously, they'd been following the ship down with all the noise and everything. So these two beautiful whales surfaced, followed by an empty oil barrel, which was coming up from to the boat was going down, I think it's six hundred feet down, so it's right down the depths, and the stub was coming up. And one was a barrel, and the first mate, actually, I remember he told off one of the deck hands for not lashing the barrel strongly enough, which was kind of a funny story, and I think he he was trying to trying to relax people a bit, you know, after the shock. But it also showed what we were saying at the beginning, which was this idea that the boat it was all about training people to be proper sailors. That was it. So the boat, yeah, things coming up, the hole in the ice, the whales, and then we were left in in silence. How did you end up being evacuated from the ice float? Well, the May Day call had been made, the South Pole had heard it, so they were alerted. I think that they then radioed McMurdo base. Uh remember that it's easy to talk about at the time, nothing was sure. You remember you're right in the middle of the Antarctic. It's very, very dangerous what we were doing. And you cannot be certain if what you think is going to happen is going to happen. So that's why we were so well prepared. But anyway, we prepared a landing of one of those H markings for helicopters and then put out some flares so they had the wind direction. And then two Siskorski 61 helicopters marked US Coast Guard arrived. I think it was about two hours after the sinking, and we were picked up, for not all of us at once, and ferried to a very remote island with solid ground, where we spent longer. And it was, you know, it was scary because you didn't know what was happening. And that's what I remember most about the whole thing, really, is get getting off the ship. Yeah, I'm not going to drown, but I never felt at ease for a long time.
SPEAKER_01The evacuation was a two-step process. They first took you to an island, uh, the Beaufort Island, I think it was, but where they dropped you off was a penguin rookery, thousands of penguins in a do you remember the rookery?
SPEAKER_02I remember standing in my engine roam overalls, which I wore for the following ten days until I arrived back in civilization and a pair of gloves. I had another obsession about not getting cold hands in case we had to walk for a couple of days across the ice. It felt lonely and it felt strange, and it felt like the end of our well of our boat, which meant a lot to all of us who'd who'd done so many thousands of miles on it. And I think we wanted to get I wanted to get back and I wanted to get safe. I wanted to see see Rob and the boys who'd done the walk. Yeah, I just wanted to feel to feel safe again, and even on the island, didn't particularly. I mean, it's very, very remote down there.
SPEAKER_01The island was a gathering point at first to get everybody off of the ice flow, and then you you were ferried over to McMurdo Base. Yeah. At this time, Robert, you are within sight of the pole, you're clearing the last few steps in the footsteps of Scott. What was it like for you at the same time on the Antarctic Plateau heading towards the South Pole?
SPEAKER_00Well, it was our moment for the whole expedition. This was the moment that I dreamt of ever since I was 11. And it was very, very fierce weather. By that stage of our being out there for 70 days, we hardly noticed about that. We just wanted to get there. We saw the South Pole on the horizon, realized that uh we'd made it. Uh Gareth, you know, who'd organized all of the logistics for our huts when we'd lived there for a year. He'd suffered incredibly with bad feet. His feet were very painful, but I remember him saying, Well, I don't really care anymore. I can see the pole, it doesn't matter how much my feet hurt. But it was a sense of excitement. There was certainly no disappointment. We were really cold, really tired. We'd got tens of kilograms of body weight. We weren't in the best shape ever, that's for sure. And we knew, thanks to our fantastic friends at Scott Base, the New Zealand team, which is near McMurdo, near to where we've been at Cape Evans, they'd managed to get us a message to say, by the way, guys, don't expect Giles on his DC three, expect Giles on a Cesta aeroplane. We had no idea how, but that's all we knew. That when we got to the pole, Giles would come in on the Cester. We had no idea of the whole drama that was unfolding. And as we were closing in, there was that sense of sort of floating somehow. I was looking for pictures the other day of us walking through this wind, and it was just a sense of floating in the completion of this journey, thinking about Scott, Armundsen, the real great explorers, Shackleton, all those people. It was just a fantastic sense of achievement and a sense that we as a whole team had done. This, but Gareth, Roger, and I, mainly thanks to Roger, I have to say, you know, we're bang on target. There was the pole. Very, very exciting. We were sort of in our dreams thinking, I wonder whether we'll see Giles flying in on the Sesta right now. That's all we were thinking. Finishing the job, being out there for 70 days, you know, nine hours a day, seven days a week, grinding our way to the South Pole, and we had achieved the longest unassisted march ever made anywhere on Earth in history. So we were feeling really good. Imagine we weren't on the radio, we had the phone, you know, 16, we had no communications. Remember, we we were navigating using the sun, the sextant and a what? And if that had failed and we'd gone off target, then I wouldn't be speaking to you now. So it was right on the edge to make it. And then came into the South Pole, fantastic base commander Lee Showen came out and very quietly told us that Southern Quest had sunk. But the first thing he said is, All hands are safe. So we were standing there and we've spoken to to only ourselves for all that time. And the first words we hear are your ships just sunk. And we're thinking, is this for real? Two things happened. One, I went into a historical spin because Scott had arrived with his team at the South Geographic Pole on January the 17th, 1911, to find the Norwegian flag flying there. I mean, that must have been possibly the worst day ever. That after all those miles, you have the disappointment that you've been beaten by the brilliant Armundsen. And then I'm thinking Shapleton lost his ship, the insurance. So all this thin of history, the fact that history had inspired me, and then suddenly I sort of entered in a small way that history. I was spinning all over the place. But as Roger and Gareth said, look, whatever's happening, and we didn't know, the team are safe, and actually that's all that really matters in the end. So it was a huge moment of going from this sense of floating excitement achievement to a real sense of disappointment, not for the whole expedition, but a sense of disappointment to not know what was going on, and how were we gonna lift ourselves up after that exhausting time and make sure that we, as a team, completed the expedition with dignity and honor? We felt well pushed down at that moment.
SPEAKER_01Three members of the expedition, you Roger, and Gareth, are at the station in the South Pole. The rest of the expedition is at McMurdo. Were you able to communicate with each other and talk about how do we get back to civilization?
SPEAKER_00No, no, everything was like James Bond. There was a communications block for a start, but we weren't allowed to speak to anybody. I don't know why, but there was all this sort of James Bond, you know, we mustn't speak to anybody, and the governments were speaking to governments and saying, you know, Giles was ready to fly to the South Pole to collect us. No, that can't happen. All this stuff is happening completely out of our control. And I have to point out that at the moment the ship sank, our team was perfectly capable of making it across the ocean, across the ice to our base at Jack Haywood base. They could have done that. But Captain Fippin, an incredible guy, um, made the right choice as a captain. He was offered a helicopter ride for our team, and he took it. But we could have made it out at least to Jack Haywood base ourselves. But as William says, we were 3,000 miles, well, William was 3,000 miles with the team in the middle of the great southern ocean in an ice field away from civilization, away from safety, and you're standing on the ocean on ice, and you take whatever you can get to be safe. And I think the captain 100% made the right choice, but that began for us to be put down by what had happened. So the plot now begins to thicken as we're standing at the pole. William and the team are at McMurdo station. There's no communications allowed between us, I'm not sure why. But now uh we need to respond to that as a team.
SPEAKER_01William, at McMurdo, you were also part of the communications blackout. Was there any way that you could communicate with the team at the South Pole at all? And and how did you negotiate your way forward?
SPEAKER_02I don't remember much negotiation being possible or communications at all. Uh tell you one thing though, Rob said that they'd lost weight on that journey to the pole. Roger Meir, who led them to the poll, as Rob said, he got on to uh we were on a sort of shuttle bus, McMurdo, or some sort of transport, and he got on, and I didn't know who it was. And he sat right next to me. I had no idea who it was. He'd completely transformed on that polar walk. It was a real shock. That's how much they'd suffered those those boys.
SPEAKER_01Incredible. Robert, how did you get from the South Pole station to McMurdo?
SPEAKER_00Well, that that was the next this is the buffet when the plot starts to thicken, it's a bit like Sherlock Holmes. That Giles was ready to fly to the pole. We had the fuel, we had the aircraft, but he was banned from going, told by the British government, told by the American government, you will not fly to pick up the three people. So we were put on board an American uh Hercules aeroplane and flown back to McMurdo Sound, which was great. And remember, the people in Antarctic are fantastic. The US pilots, all the team at McMurdo. This wasn't them, and I always remember when we were flying back in three and a half hours across the 900 nautical miles we just walked. I remember the captain looking at us three, and he held our gaze, and he was looking down, and he was giving us a little bit of a salute on how did you people do that? So it was a great moment of team, but we were brought back to McMurdo, reunited with our team, and then we were given some instructions on what we could do, and that was when my whole night changed. It really did. Uh, William and the team were we were all in this room, and these very official people came into the room, and they just said the following Right, we are going to evacuate your whole team and we're gonna charge you for it back to Christchurch, New Zealand. And they said, You you can leave your hut, you can leave your aeroplane, and the words are we've got recordings of this, so it's not just people's imagination. Uh, we will bulldoze, I repeat, bulldoze all of your equipment into the ocean, so don't worry about it. So we're sitting there going, hang on a minute. We had made a commitment to our patrons, Lord Shackleton, son of Irvis Shackleton, Sir Peter Scott, son of Captain Scott, and Jack Houstone, the great man. We've made a commitment that we would leave Antarctica without any sign of our activities. And we were being told, don't worry, we'll put you on the plane, bulldoze all this stuff into the ocean, bye. And we said, no, we're not gonna do that. And at that moment, William, the team, myself and Giles and everybody had a quick sort of con slab to say we need to leave a team here in Antarctica for another year. Because remember, we're losing the chance for a ship to come in to collect it, because the Ike is gonna come in. So anybody who they must be there for another year, we'll take this paid ride back to New Zealand, but who's gonna stay? And incredibly, Gareth, whose feet you have no idea the suffering that he had with his feet walking to the pole. Bandages, blood, all kinds of catastrophes, hobbling. I'm sure William remembers Gareth hobbling along. And Gareth stood up at the back of this meeting of ours and said, I will stay for another year because I'm the only person that knows how to run our base. And he said, if you leave a base in Antarctica without anybody on it, after a year of storms, it's going to be all flattened and everything's gonna be blown across Antarctica. So he volunteered. Two members of the expedition put their hands up, Steve Brony and Tim Lovejoy. So these three incredible people said, right, we're staying. We were hustled off, put on this aeroplane, flown back to Christchurch, New Zealand, and before I left, I said, Gareth, don't panic, I'll be back with another ship to collect you in another year. Remember, we're bankrupt, we don't have our home, there's no shit, everybody's presiding us. But we're starting to rise up a bit as a team, aren't we, William? Saying, okay, we're we're gonna we're we're not going down on this. We're gonna finish the job because we promised all the people who helped us make this expedition happen. We promised them that we would leave Antarctica tidy and clean, and we will do it. That was the sense of our determination.
SPEAKER_01So then what? Yeah, I know you're broke at the time. The original plan was you were going to sell the ship. That would help cover some of the debts. Well, the ship is gone. Now you have even more debt than you imagine, but you also have an obligation to return to Antarctica and rescue your three fellow expeditioners. What on earth do you do then?
SPEAKER_00Well, basically, it was a major catastrophe because you know William and I raised all that money, but the loss of the ship, we ended up with a debt at that stage of about a million. We had three people rely on us in Antarctica to come and get them. And thank goodness, Greenpeace, who had read about how we'd been treated in Antarctica, they'd read about some of the garbage and rubbish. We they'd read of the stories of of McMurdo and how they weren't doing the right thing, which they are now, by the way, they are now. And Greenpeace said to us, Look, uh, we can take our ship down. We would like to use your Jack Tayward base for a year, and we would like to be in Antarctica, and at the end of that year, we will remove everything and take away your plane, take away all the equipment and leave Antarctica Tide. And while we're at it, we'll pull out the three people. So their ship would come in, unload all their equipment, leave their team there, and take Gareth and his two companions back to South America. So I was going catch it, this is just the best thing ever. So I'm sort of not relaxing because we've got to pay off the debts. William's tying up things in Australia. Uh, the team is pretty much spread across the planet. But I'm thinking, great, all I've got to worry about is the debt. I don't have to worry about three people having to spend uh even more time in Antarctica. We're gonna deliver on our mission. And then in December, this is when things get pretty much out of control. That the Greenpeace captain rings me up. But remember, there's no mobile phones. He rings me up and says, uh, Rob, we can't get in. The ice again, quite honestly, we don't want to end up like Southern Quest, so we can't get in this year. How are we gonna get them out? We've got to get them out now. So Captain Kershaw stepped forward as ever, amazing man, and he organized a flight to fly from South America across Antarctica with me to collect the three people from Cape Evans, and then fly all the way back to South America, a flight that had never been done before. And we managed to raise some money and off we went, landed at Cape Evans, much to the shock of the team there, who thought, who are these people? And I jump out of the plane and they all get on it, and we think Greenpeace will arrive at some stage, maybe next year, and they can undertake their mission. But the people fly all the way back to South America, land in Punta Arenas in Chile. Wonderful chap with a phone on an enormously long wire, came to where Giles and I were sat with the team and said, Robert, there's a telephone call for you. Just got back, and it was the Greenpeace captain saying, Oh, by the way, Rob, the ice has gone out, the ship will be there in three days' time. So our entire flight across Antarctica was a complete waste of time. Greenpeace could have taken out the three gentlemen, but they did their job, and fantastically, everything was cleaned a year later from that beach, the job was done, we delivered on our word of what we said we were going to do, and that was a huge relief. But of course, flying across Antarctica and all those sort of things only increased by debt.
SPEAKER_01It does occur to me that in the footsteps of Scott was one of the great adventures of the modern era. And even though it might have been unnecessary in hindsight, your flight from you and Giles when you flew from Punta Arenas to the Jack Hayward base, that was one of the amazing achievements in aviation history. Just proving what humans can do. And that reminds me of something that Roger Meer wrote in the closing of the book in the footsteps of Scott. And he talked about the pioneers of Antarctic exploration in the early 1900s. And he said, quote, they conducted themselves in accordance with the rules imposed by the Antarctic alone. If they made mistakes, then it remained their responsibility to atone. And it was in search of this basic freedom to live by one's own judgment, wit, and skill that our expedition had been devised to restore the adventure, isolation, and commitment that has been lost through the employment of the paraphernalia of modern times. With that thought in mind, I want to ask William what does participating in this expedition mean to you today?
SPEAKER_02I think the big learning is that anything can happen, as we've done all these things and we talked about that none were expected, but we we got around it. We we kept pushing on and found a solution to all these major problems that we've just described. I think also the idea of adventure is very interesting because uh obviously not everyone can go on a ship and go on aeroplanes and go to amazing places like Antarctica. But there is an adventure in daily life and there's risk in daily life. If there's anything to learn from it, I think it's preparing for risk as much as you can, because things go wrong, that that's life. I think also what I got from it was uh try it. Whatever it is, uh whether you've got a tough project of work or at university or whatever, have a go and start. Actually start it. And then it's never as bad as you think. On episode one, we talked about that cold warehouse in in London. We actually started it and then just keep going, keep trying. That's that's what that's what I got from from that expedition.
SPEAKER_01And Robert, the end of the footsteps expedition was the beginning of your new life as an advocate for Antarctica.
SPEAKER_00For me, I was angry. No one owns Antarctica. And within a few years I dedicated my life to make sure that we have the sense to leave Antarctica alone as a natural reserve land for science and peace. And that was inspired by a certain amount of anger. And I read something published on March the 29th, 1986, month or so after we lost the ship, and this was a letter signed by all of our supporters, including Lord Shackleton, Sir Peter Scott, of course, because it's the Times of London. There have been a number of statements and criticisms of the in the footsteps of Scott Antarctic expedition, both as to the competence of the members and their right to be in the Antarctic. We believe these criticisms are unfair and unjustified. So it wasn't just us thinking that, and I think that as William and I have often said, you know, the last great exploration left on Earth is for us to survive on Earth. So when people actually connect with the outdoors and realize that when you're walking to the pole, it's quite a simple thing. You feel incredibly isolated. William and the team felt incredibly isolated on the ship. And that sense of isolation makes you think how isolated we are on planet Earth. We've just got this beautiful planet in the middle of a universe that goes on forever. The purpose of thin ice, to me, it began at the head of the footsteps of Scott. What a story. And we've tried very much to engage people in adventure, in, as William says, getting out, giving it a go, making a start on your dreams and hope. We do firmly believe that engagement with the outdoors is a sure way of making us love the world that we're in.
SPEAKER_01It's a great thought to end on. Do you love the world you're in? I'm not suggesting you have to load everything in it, but if you love something, higher-level reasoning dictates that you take action to protect it. I want to thank William for sharing his experiences on Southern Quest and my co-host Robert Swann for the opportunity to participate in his ongoing adventures to protect Antarctica by taking care of our planet. Thin Ice is produced by Robert Swann and Dan Smith. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review to help us spread the word as we all do our part to save the wild world. You can see pictures and learn more on our website. Just search for thinice.earth. And we're on Substack. Again, search for thinice.earth and look for the penguin. Our theme music is by Eti Adversel, and sincere thanks to Bernadette Darciato for keeping us all on track. Until next time, keep Earth Wild, be kind, and chill out.