May Day M’aider, from Antarctica

It’s May Day — a time to honor the bounty of nature and hard work, and a distress call derived from French, m’aider ("help me"). So, this is a perfect day to launch Thin Ice, which celebrates nature and the hard work of preserving wild spaces while sounding an international plea for action. 

Co-hosts Robert Swan (the first person to walk to both the South and North Poles) and Dan Smith share stories from the wild in hopes of inspiring people to appreciate and protect the remaining wild places on Earth, especially Antarctica. 

Episode 1 features William Fenton, the first person to volunteer to help Robert ultimately raise (US) $5 million in the early 1980s to fund the first private expedition to the South Pole in the modern era. 

Together, Robert and William didn’t make London Bridge fall down, but Southern Quest, their expedition ship, did bash into London’s Tower Bridge. And that was just the start of their entertaining yet death-defying adventure.

You can learn more and read our blog online and on Substack at thinice.earth. Thanks for tuning in!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

It's January 11th, 1986, and Robert Swand and two colleagues are within sight of the South Geographic Pole. For 70 days, they've been chasing Robert's childhood dream, walking 900 miles from the edge of Antarctica, entirely unassisted, with no communications, navigating by watch and sextant because there was no GPS, and hauling hundreds of pounds of food and supplies on sleds behind them. Only government-sanctioned teams were in Antarctica at the time, and Swan's trip was not approved. In fact, it was actively opposed by most governments. Yet Swan and company persevered, and in just a few more miles, they would make history for the unassisted walk and becoming the first private expedition to the South Pole since the heroic age of polar exploration ended three-quarters of a century before. On that day in 1986, more people had walked on the moon than had walked to the pole. Gaunt and exhausted, they approached their goal with 30-not winds in their faces, and they were frozen to the bone by the temperature, 40 degrees below zero. That's the point where Celsius and Fahrenheit actually come together at 40 below. On that same day, 900 miles to the north, Swan's ship was approaching the Antarctic coast where it had delivered them a year before. Christened as Southern Quest, the ship's 20-person crew carried an airplane that would bring the triumphant explorers back from the bottom of the world. That was the plan, anyway. Because even as the expeditioners neared victory, the Southern Quest was trapped in rapidly shifting pack ice and in grave danger of sinking into the Southern Ocean like so many doomed vessels before. The crew has no idea where Robert and his team are or if the trio is even still alive. But on this day, they were worried about their own lives. Welcome to episode one of Thin Ice. I'm Dan Smith, one of your co-hosts, and I'm excited to introduce our other co-host, Robert Swann.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Hello, Robert. Hello, Dan. It's great to see you again. And thanks to everyone who stopped by and tuned in. I'm so looking forward to our new project, the Thin Ice Podcast. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

So many listeners already know that you are the first human to walk to the South and North Poles, and that you're a passionate advocate for preserving and protecting Antarctica as a dedicated space for science and peace, which is called for in the Antarctic Treaty that governs the activity on the continent. But your life mission began when you were eleven years old. It it was Christmas Day when you were eleven, and you told your parents that you were going to follow in the footsteps of Robert Scott. And for those who don't know, Robert Scott is the heroic expl explorer who reached the pole in 1912, but he perished on his return. Seventy years later, when you were a young man fresh out of university, you set about assembling a team and raising five million dollars to fund his expedition. In today's dollars, that's twenty million bucks that you had to go out and raise. But with help, you did it. And then you led the walking team to the North Pole. And ever since you have literally circumnavigated the globe and reached millions of people with a message about clean energy solutions for the civilized world to protect Antarctica and the rest of the wild world. We met because I was one of those millions who were touched by your message. My company was a major sponsor of Robert's 2023 expedition to the South Pole. And you and I did our first podcast back then called Undaunted with Robert Swan and NTT Data. Some of you may be familiar with that. So, Robert, can you share the purpose of the Undaunted 2023 expedition and what have you been up to since then?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

I'd always dreamt to complete a crossing of the Antarctic landmass on foot. We'd reached the South Pole like Scott and Armundsen, but Shackleton, the great British explorer, he'd always had this dream of crossing the Antarctic landmass, and I thought, well, why not? We only had 600 miles to go to complete that, and it was possibly the hardest thing I've ever done, undaunted, because I was too old to be out there in Antarctica. At 35, you're an old man in polar travel, and I was 67, so I really shouldn't have been there.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

A quick sidebar here for some color commentary. In 1986, as you know, Rob walked 900 miles from the Ross Ice Shelf to the South Pole. That left 600 miles to reach the opposite coast. In a 2017 expedition, Rob experienced hip failure with 300 miles to go. A third attempt ended with 100 miles to go when his new hip replacement pulled out of its socket. But undaunted, Rob tried again in 2023 and achieved his cross-Antarctic objective on January 11th. That marked an almost spooky historical coincidence. Here's Rob again.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Had various setbacks, uh, hips fell out, dislocated, all kinds of problems, but we hung on in there, reached the South Pole incredibly, at the same time exactly, on the same day, January the 11th, 37 years after the footsteps of Scott. That was history really joining together. And I'd achieved with my son Barney the crossing of the Antarctic landmass. And since then, we've been continuing to make sure that we have the sense to leave Antarctica alone. We have only a few years until 2041 when the world will decide. And also continuing to have positive messages for young people who I think in this rather gloomy world need positive messages, especially on sustainability.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

I would add that you don't have to be young to need positive messages. When we first met, I was 62. Uh my youngest child had just graduated from college. And honestly, I was bewildered, if not actually depressed, about the state of the world. There was lots of talk at the time about sustainability, but I didn't have much actual hope until I heard your presentation at our company event. And that inspired me to do my part, beginning incrementally to do things that were within my power to steadily reduce my impact on the planet. I'm not carbon-free by any means yet, but I'm closer. And I'm participating with others who are doing the same thing on their own or in groups around the world. My favorite quote of yours is the greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it. So whatever anyone can do may seem small, but your actions can be multiplied by millions and billions of people making similar efforts. Great things require contributions from others. Which conveniently sets up my next question. When you got genuinely serious about your first walk to the South Pole in the early 1980s, you were alone, but not for long. Tell us about building a team and the people who made your first expedition possible.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

We had possibly 20, 25 people who were practically involved almost on a daily basis. We had hundreds of volunteers that came down to help the preparation of our ship. And of course, you know, thousands, literally thousands of sponsors, people giving us one pound or people giving us more than one pound. But often say to people that when you put something together, you need to get lots of people with small amounts to help you get it going. But I have to recognize uh my very long-suffering girlfriend at the time, Rebecca Ward, of course, Pete Malcolm, who would organize our whole ship operation, God rest him. Uh, Roger Meir, the brilliant mountaineer, uh, he would make sure we got to the South Pole, Gareth Wood, who would be the logistical genius behind all of this, and Mike Stroud, who would make sure as a doctor that we were healthy, and last but by no means least, our brilliant one-man camera team, John Tolson, he would be with us in Antarctica making our film. So this was an enormous spreading of a lot of people coming together to make it happen.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

And one of the very first people who signed on to the mission is our guest for this first episode, William Fenton. So let's open up the mic and say hello, William. Hello, hi, Dan and Rob. So thank you for joining us on this inaugural edition of Thin Ice. William, how did you meet Rob and when did he first mention the idea about walking to the South Pole?

SPEAKER_02 9:29

I met Rob at university back in 1976 when we both arrived there. I was kind of like a normal student, and Rob was a guy who looked like sort of two people mixed into one body, huge guy, shaven head. And that was a time that people really didn't have that sort of look at all. So he stood out quite well, and there was a lot of speculation about who this man was and where he'd been.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Sidebar. Where Robert had been before college is another fascinating story. I'll make this quick. His father wanted him to follow the Swan tradition and go to Oxford, but Rob had other plans and he moved to South Africa. There he worked as a laborer and ultimately as a taxi driver to earn money to fund a bicycle trip to the northern tip of Africa. He did bike most of the way, but covered the last bit riding on top of a train where he was singed by constant cinders from the engine. It gave him a rather wild look that he maintained when he marched into a Durham University Dean's office to declare that he was there to study classical history. Back to William.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

And so he's a sort of already an interesting character to all of us. And uh I got talking to him. I'd played rugby at his school against Rob. I could see he was a tough guy, but I knew he would be, because having played rugby against that team, I knew that these were serious physical people. So we had a bit of a conversation about that, I guess. And um, but most of all, you know, Rob had something to say right from the beginning. We didn't get into the Antarctic immediately, but as I got to know him, I noticed more and more books about Scott on the ground, on his on his sofa and in his very untidy kind of room. And I read a book when I was uh 10 or 11 about Ernest Shackleton, which I liked so much that I memorized the first page and repeated it to my parents, much to their boredom. So that was immediately a link, you know, Shackleton and Scott. So I guess it started from there, really.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

And do you remember when he first brought up the idea of I'm going to walk to Antarctica and I'd like you to participate? If you remember that moment, how did you react when he first brought it up?

SPEAKER_02 11:37

Well, it was a surprising. After university, I went to work in media and communications, which has always been sort of my interest. And I think Rob saw that that's what I was doing, and then I think you probably needed a bit of help on that side, and uh and so approached me. The idea was to begin the effort to communicate the expedition and through that to raise commercial sponsorship. It was really that that cemented my interest. My lifelong, my career has been in sponsorship. I think that's really the that was the very beginning of it. And I must say, looking back on the materials that we produced then, which I haven't looked at for years and years, I got them out, dusted them off recently. It really wasn't too bad, even for that time. But one of the things that really moved it, apart from Rob, who is the driving force always from the beginning right to the end. I mean, he's the he was the motor behind all this. But we need a lot of help, we need a lot of money, as you said in the introduction. We had a s a great story to tell. That's been something I I learned there that I've used the rest of my life, is that if you've got a story, it's so much easier to communicate.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

So, Robert, what what kind of story did you tell William to get him to sign on?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

William's a very modest chap. I mean, he is an athlete himself, one of the top horsemen and still rowing now at a senior level as he's moving towards you know getting on to 70 odds. So he he's a very fine athlete himself. And I think that idea of doing something extraordinary which would require a lot of physicality, I think interested him. But I all I felt very much that William was steady. I I'm not so steady really as a human being, and I felt that he could bring to the table some some level of organization. And the other thing was there was no one else. I mean, William and I went into the warehouse, this this dusty place full of rats and mice in in the east end of London.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Sidebar. A polar expedition requires a lot of stuff and a lot of space to keep, sort, and pack the stuff. So Rob found an abandoned warehouse near the wharf in a neglected section of London within sight of the Tower Bridge. It wasn't a place where couples would go for a Sunday stroll, but it was near Captain Scott's original warehouse, and it was cheap. So that warehouse became home base for the team he dreamed of building.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

I mean, William and I went into the warehouse, this dusty place full of rats and mice in in the east end of London. And I remember looking at him, and we had sort of one table, I think, which was a piece of wood between two tea chests or something. No telephone, nothing, an echo room, freezing cold, no heating. And it was just William and I sat there saying, right, okay, how are we gonna make this happen? And I think that's what I always think about missions or anything in life, that you actually have to make a start. So many people talk about doing things, but actually, what was great about William and I joining together is that we just said, right, we're starting this. We're gonna hire this warehouse that's virtually no money a month, and we're gonna make a start. And I think that's a huge gap for people who don't actually commit to making a start, and that's really how how this all came together. Just William and I sat there freezing in the warehouse thinking maybe it's gonna be colder here than at the South Pole. So you rented that before you had any money, is that correct? Yeah, we we never had any money here. Let's be honest. We still haven't got much money 40 years on, but no, we've we made that commitment, and I think that's really important. We said, right, we're gonna base ourselves here and we're gonna make this happen, and we're not gonna quit until we've made it happen. And I think William's got some very interesting views on the difference between raising money today in you know 2025 and raising money all those years ago. And I don't know what you think, William, but that there are differences, and I think in some ways, possibly it was easier then, and maybe it was harder then. But what's your view, Will?

SPEAKER_02 15:54

I agree, I think it's a bit of both. I think that we were, you know, we talk about now the attention economy and everyone's fighting to get people's attention. You've got so much social media and so on. I think that if we'd had social media in the expedition, it would have made it much easier to follow, it would have been much more visible, it would have we'd have told the story to a much wider audience even than we did. But at the same time, you know, we we were able to use traditional media. We had a book deal very early on, which was very good with the very prestigious publisher, Jonathan Cape. We had a TV deal with IT ITV, which is a big commercial station in Britain, and uh that that turned heads at that time because it was not easy to get to get a book deal as a pro it and still is very difficult to do. And uh so it was these all these bricks putting in place in the wall that we built up. We I think I sort of compare it to like leapfrogging, you get one thing done and then another, you can do another leverage that to do another thing. And so the warehouse was an example because the warehouse was the exact spot on the water in the docks in London where Captain Scott had left 74 years before. Truly the exact spot. So that was a story, and that area was about to be developed and turned into a huge, it's like sort of Manhattan in London now, but it wasn't it wasn't then, but it was in a year or so later, it was that the development started. And the development corporation there saw what we were doing, saw the story, saw the links, saw how they could work the historical and the courage and the enterprise of Scott was doing something, they were trying to do something, building something difficult to do. So all these little parallels we we were able to work and convince people that you know we were something worth supporting.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

And we had a great story, but also just to for the younger listeners, William, what did we have in that warehouse? Well, we had two landlines. We had no internet, no Wi-Fi, no laptop, no Google. Our photocopier was about the size of a car. I think we got it off the great explorer Wally Herbert, who was his contribution, and that was it. There was there was if we needed to research something, we had to go to the library. It it all our letters were letters sent out to sponsors by post. People would reply by post, or hopefully, fingers crossed, ring us up, or you and I had to then ring them up and remind them that we'd sent them a letter months before. That's how it was. And I think that in many ways it was harder because of that lack of technology, but as you say, possibly easier in some way because we had a story that wasn't in competition with a million other stories, with people liking themselves and you know, Facebook, Instagram, all these different things. So I I agree with you. I I'm really happy that we crossed that boundary between, if you like, the old explorers and the people today. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

And we were also very lucky to have the we we bought the ship quite early on. We managed to get a deal to have it moored by a Tower Bridge in London, which made the most fantastic backdrop for it. So we bit we bought a banner and put it on the thing saying in the footsteps of Scott Antarctic Expedition, with no real, you know, if we if somebody said you've got to leave today for the Antarctic, then we could never have done it. Nothing was done really. But it was there, it was physically there. It's 134 feet long, big red ship. Looked like a sort of marine fire engine, a very impressive boat. It looked great. We were able to bring people down and say this is this is the ship, it's going to go to the Antarctic. We already have one sponsor, which is Shell, who happened to support Captain Scott. So it was kind of impressive, you know. And I mean, I still it's still now when I'm talking about it, I feel impressed and proud that that's that's what we did with so little, so few resources.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

So you have a ship docked at the Tower Bridge with an advertisement for anybody who passes by to see. But why did you need a ship to begin with?

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Well that that was a big issue for us, and that's really why this expedition costs so much money. People now, including myself, can fly to Antarctica, which is great. The the cost of their expedition might be you know a hundred and fifty thousand US dollars. But the only way to Antarctica 40 years ago was to buy a ship, just like the real explorers, Scott, Shackleton, Armundsen, and that you would have to sail to Antarctica, live a year waiting for uh the chance to go to the pole, and then hope like hell the ship came back to collect you, just like the real explorers, you know, a hundred years before us, and that was the only way we could do it. So we needed the ship to get to Antarctica, do the job, and I suppose in many ways that's why we were so unique, is that people had just simply not done this since the time of Scott Shackleton and Armundsen, maybe as William would agree, maybe because it it required so much money to do it.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

I think you had mentioned that Pete Malcolm was the one who actually scouted up and down the coast of England looking for a ship. It was a North Sea trawler, I believe, but now you were going to take it down to Antarctica. What kind of work did you have to do to prepare the ship?

SPEAKER_02 21:08

I can answer that a little bit if you like, Rob, because there's an interesting thing here was that the ship had been a trawler built in 1959, and then it would it was converted to be an anti-pollution cleanup vessel for a while. So there's a nice little sort of tie-in there to what we were trying to do. We then bought it and it had to be what they call ice-strengthened to meet Lloyd's insurance requirements, and so that's what that's really what was done to the ship to make it capable of going down to the ice.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

You know, as all ships, as I found out, you know, in the last 40 years, anything to do with ships or yachts is like pouring a lot of money into a very large hole. So we had very, very serious problems, and William and Richard Downe, who was a great supporter at this time, we would sort of think, oh well, we'dn't get 150,000 and we'll get the job done. And then William would calculate. With Richard Downe, that that might have got us to the end of the River Thames at the very best. So there was a constant battle to raise more money. But the ship had to be done right because we wanted to make sure that we were insured and all those very important things. So it was a real battle, and again, no budget. No one was signing checks and saying this and this. And so many people came forward to help us. One of the last shipyards on the River Tyne, near Newcastle, north of England, they they helped us. All these people came forward to help us make the journey happen. And I think that was the essence of this. No one was signing checks. We were getting in-kind sponsorship on an hourly basis. I think our first sponsor was 2,000 cans of beer, which actually I think one can made it to Antarctica because we drank it in order to keep going.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

Backing up just a little bit, when you first got the ship and you were bringing it down to its its new home by the warehouse, you sort of had a bang of an introduction with the ship.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

That's correct. We came into London underneath the famous beautiful tower bridge, and there were all these people there. You had TV stations, people, a band was playing, and we had all these fantastic supporters down there. And the pilot of Southern Quest, our ship, promptly forgot that she was an old ship. And if he wanted to ask for a stern, it would take 20 seconds for the engine to sort of panic and then go the other way around. And uh we came flying in and hit the dock side, and I think at three to four knots, exploded exploded a huge area of the dock into the air, and you know, concrete was flying, people were sort of pretty upset, and then there was silence, and as the ship then engaged into a stern, we went back, hit tower bridge. This was a major catastrophe on day one. But as William and I found out, I mean, William and I were going like this can't be happening. This, you know, this is just the worst moment of our lives. But the next day we had a lot of press saying Antarctic expedition starts with a crunch. Yeah, but no one was hurt.

SPEAKER_02 24:22

No one was hurt, I've got to say that.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Yeah, no one was hurt, but it was it was one of those moments where we learned, William and I learned that you can almost turn anything round, however negative it might be.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Do you remember that, William? Were you there when the ship banged into the dock? Or were you on the ship?

SPEAKER_02 24:39

No, I was I was I was about ten ten yards in front of the bow as it came in, and it seemed to be getting closer and closer. And then someone who was on the on the boat shouted, get out of the way, which we did. But I mean, Rob, a a very good test of leadership here and crisis management is that you know Rob had to say something because we had a lot of guests there. I remember him sort of standing up in his way very sort of proudly and saying this this at least shows the icebreaking capacities of our boat, you know, which was a great line, and it was true because because it did it did knock out quite a few uh quite a few bricks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Continuing then with your preparations, you have the warehouse, you're starting to get some people, you're starting to get some money coming in. What else did you really have to worry about? Because it you're sending people to spend a year in Antarctica and then make a 900-mile walk. What were the other considerations that were were worrisome at the time that you had to deal with getting ready for the trek?

SPEAKER_00 25:35

Well, I think the money was I was gonna say exactly the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

Money number one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

And you know, the the we had to it's a long way from London to the Antarctic. We went via Cape Town, South Africa, then Christchurch, uh Port of Littleton, New Zealand, and we didn't have any money. So my job was to go ahead of the ship to try and raise money in each place to keep the expedition going. So I went to Cape Town, the ship sailed south. Uh William was on board, and then I went to Littleton, New Zealand, and again raising money, raising money, uh making sure that we didn't leave too many debts back in Britain. So it was only money in my head, not actually really thinking about what we were about to do.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Once you arrived, you could not begin the walk right away. You had to spend a winter in complete darkness.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

The issue of Antarctica and our journey, uh, the route that we take to the pole, that we wanted, like Scott and Armundsen, to get as near to the pole as we could. We were following in the footsteps of Scott. So we were our destination was Cape Evans, where Captain Scott's hut still stands today. However, Antarctica, the continent, is surrounded in the winter by a lot of pack ice. It goes out hundreds of miles from where you are. So we had to get in there while there was no ice, and you've only got possibly a month and a half, two months of a window to get in there, unload your ship, unload the people, unload the hut, all your supplies, and then the ship retreats back out before that ice comes in. That's why we had to get a bit of a shift on, because after all those years of preparation, we didn't want to be arriving in Antarctica and couldn't get to our destination. So that time was very rushed, and the ship with William on board really had to get a move on. We had to make it happen as fast as we could, so we wouldn't miss that weather weather ice window.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

So, William, you were you were on the ship. You've you've been on the ship from London down to the coast of Antarctica. Do you remember your first view of the continent? And what were your duties?

SPEAKER_02 27:51

Well, arriving in Antarctica, uh, some landmarks for me was the first time I saw uh one of those birds, an albatross and an Antarctic petrel, beautiful little bird, and that's the sign that ice is around, just like I'd read in the books when I was 11. Wow, can you imagine how exciting in real life? Then icebergs, I've you know, to see an iceberg in real life and go past it, luckily not like the Titanic, they're incredible things. And then the Antarctic itself, I remember very clearly the first sight. I can see it literally in my mind's eye, that kind of black rock and and the ice stuck to it, the shoreline, the waves slightly lapping on the on the ice, but most of all, the silence. I've never it sounds strange, I've never heard silence like that before. It a physical presence, and that really struck me. I can remember it like it was yesterday. You asked me what the duties were. I took a job as third engineer, assistant engineer on the boat. I've always liked mechanical things, so that suited me quite well. Also, it's much warmer in the engine room than anywhere else, so that was good. And uh, like everybody else, our job was to unload the stores in a very rapid time because of the weather, as Rob was saying. So it was a lot of working. I mean, it's daylight all the time. We were working around the clock, and uh it was some of the hardest physical work I've ever done. Getting bags of coal out of a hold of a ship, taking it across on a sort of pontoon thing with an outboard motor, which we made ourselves, getting it onto the beach with a blizzard blowing, seals watching you, and dragging these heavy weights out and having to do it properly, because it wasn't just like sort of moving house. This was moving house for people whose whose the stuff we were moving was the only way they were going to survive for a year. So it was a mixture of hard work and and care, like a lot of things in life.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Once you had all of that in place and everything was unloaded and the hut was in place and secured against the the wind and the cold, do you remember the moment of getting back on the ship and and sailing away? What was that like? Leaving five people, you knew you weren't going to see them again for a year. What what were your emotions at that moment?

SPEAKER_02 29:47

Well, it was a bit like when you say goodbye at an airport to somebody that you you you like very much or love, you know, you feel you feel that sadness. But in context of Antarctica, what I clearly remember is that we we set off in in the boat quite slowly with the engines, kind of that familiar feel of the boat moving away. And we were all uh we watched, I remember seeing five guys in these red suits and their sort of weird hats they were wearing against the cold, and they just looked so small because you know the backdrop was Mount Erebus, an active volcano and a beach, and they looked tiny, and I thought, oh god, you know, they're gonna live in this place. And I've you know, I've got to say that I was quite looking forward to uh knowing that we'd be with all with any luck we'd be back in Sydney in about 10 days' time to the warmth and surfing and barbecues and all the rest of it. I thought, God, those guys, you know, that's how how are they yeah, I just had such respect and I I felt yeah, very emotional and and I felt with them, but I'm glad I wasn't with them, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

So Robert, on the other side, thank you, William. You you are standing on the shores of Antarctica watching your ship, your last connection to civilization sail off. You have no communications, so now you're entirely on your own. What did you think at that moment as the ship was disappearing?

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Well, it it it it was the first real moment after all the storm of battling and raising money, and William and I and and Pete Malcolm and all this stuff, suddenly, as William said, there was silence and this little red dot becoming smaller and smaller and smaller on the horizon and then gone. And I look I remember looking to my left as I was looking out, and there was Captain Scott Hutt a few hundred metres from where we were, and Scott and his team died on their attempt to to reach the South Pole first. And I remember it was just a huge realization of actually what we were about to do, and I I was terrified, I was really sad to see uh my incredible girlfriend, uh Rebecca disappearing, and William and all these incredible people that we were a family, and bye-bye, and I think also that sense of the enormity, as I said, of feeling so small. Not only would we have to live for nine months together in a hut on the edge of Antarctica, guess what? We'd have to walk to the South Pole as well. So yeah, it was it was a pretty intense day.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

William, you are leaving your colleagues behind for several months of darkness and bitter cold. You, I understand, then traveled with the ship to Sydney. Did most of the crew stay in Sydney? And what did you do it in in the coming year while you were waiting to go back eventually and and pick up the folks who had stayed to walk to the pole?

SPEAKER_02 32:50

Well the ship was based in in Sydney, and uh we used it to do a couple of uh charter trips, one of which was a bird watching exhibition, expedition, I remember. And uh we were moored in a fantastic area of Sydney, right up across the water from the Opera House, a place called Circular Key, which is normally just for cruise boats. But because we had a certain impact and a certain presence and a media presence, I guess we were allowed to berth the boat there. So what a great place to live and what high visibility for the expedition to be there. And interestingly, uh parked, or not parked, to use the shipping word berthed, next to us was a Greenpeace vessel, which later got even bigger prominence because a year later, one of them, the Rainbow Warrior, was blown up in New Zealand by the French Secret Service. So this was exciting, but it's also a bigger point, which is I think this was the beginning of sort of mask eco-consciousness. And I hope our expedition, we tried very much to be to be a part of that. And seeing people like Greenpeace, seeing physically the boat there, it's a reminder of what this was all about, which is, you know, which is what interests you. I know, Dan, which is that the wild and conserving it. So, yeah, that was home, living on a ship. Can you imagine in the middle of Sydney having an Australian girlfriend? And it was just such fun. And I had a job. I took up my old job, which was in the media with an Australian company, which later on I developed. I went to the America's Cup in Perth a few years later. So that was great. So I had a home and a setup in Sydney and a great place to live. And then every so often we'd have to get the ship ready again and re-refuel it, get it ready, raise more money, find more things, and uh set off again down to the Antarctic. So I did quite a few of those journeys. We took an Australian expedition down to Mawson's Hut, who was one of the Australian adventurers, the same vein as Scott. That was very exciting and interesting. We made money, of course, by doing that, which we desperately needed. And I was lucky enough to do several trips from Australia down to the Antarctic. And honestly, crossing the Southern Ocean is something. I mean, that's the world's wildest, stormiest ocean. And so uh I've been in some pretty big storms and and uh I'm quite good at subsequently at managing seasickness on car ferries and so on. So that was that was one that was one benefit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

So in in a future episode, we do intend to talk about uh Robert's experience for the for that year while he was in Antarctica with with uh Roger and Gareth and John and also talk about the walk to the pole. But let's go now to the the ship has to return. You you have a scheduled date you haven't heard from uh the expedition crew, but you have a scheduled date to to pick them up. The the plan is you have a plane that that you will re-ass it, you disassembled it to get it onto the boat. You intended to reassemble it in Antarctica and fly to the pole to pick them up. But there's something happened as you were coming into Antarctica. What what what what happened there that was the problem with Southern Quest?

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Well, Southern Quest, the ship, uh, was turned into effectively a uh an aircraft carrier. So we brought down this this aeroplane, which we reassembled on an ice flow because the ship was moored next to a gigantic piece of flat ice. That piece of flat ice became a runway, and the uh bridge of the ship became the uh the control tower. So uh the the plane was built and skis were on it and it had extra fuel and everything ready to go to the South Pole. And it was a very exciting time because we did a few test flights. And honestly, when you've seen a plane that you've kind of reassembled yourself, and then using your own kind of runway made of ice, using your own ship as the control center and refueling it using barrels of of fuel. I mean, these are things that I couldn't believe we were doing. I thought this this is what an adventure, what a great thing to do. And then we one of one of the test flights of of the aircraft came came down rather heavily on one of its skis and it broke a ski. Those skis are made of fiberglass, and fiberglass needs, I think, 12 hours to uh to set. So we had to everything was delayed by 12 hours, and those 12 hours were absolutely crucial to some pretty dramatic events that happened later.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

As William was talking about his time in Sydney with the team. Obviously, we were living in a hut with no communications out to William and the and the rest of the team. Obviously, we were thinking of William sort of surfing with beautiful women on the beach of Bondi Beach and having nice food and everything. But obviously, we started walking to the pole. It took us 70 days, uh, nine hours a day, seven days a week, with the brilliant Roger Meer in leaving us and Gareth. We were out there doing all this stuff, having no idea of what was going on back in the real world, because our plan had been, and we even had on our sledges our passports with us, because the plan was that we would arrive at the South Geographic Pole, and our brilliant pilot, Captain Giles Kershaw, would pick us up and then take us back to South America. This would this was the plan for years before us going. And what had transpired is that Giles was referred to.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

Right here, our Thin Ice Podcast team encountered a recording glitch. So let me fill you in. The original plan worked out long ago in London was that the famed polar pilot Giles Kershaw would fly from Chile to the South Pole in a rented D T four airplane to pick up the Quantan team at the South Pole. However, very late in the game, landing rights in Antarctica were refused. So the DT-4 from Chile was not an option. As Rocket Planes next, the team purchased and disassembled a small extraplane, which the Southern Quest had to carry and deliver to the coast of Antarctica. If not for the issue of the airplane, the ship could have held back from the coast and picked up John Tolson and Michael Stroud, who had remained at the hut, once the pack ice posed less of a threat.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Of course, being us, uh William and Giles and Pete and everybody, they said, Well, no one owns Antarctica, how can we be refused permission? So that's why they bought a tiny plane, a Cessna 185, took it to pieces, uh, the ship became an aircraft carrier, which I love, William. That's and that's why they had to go south early. Had we flown out from the South Pole, the ship would have hung off Antarctica waiting for the ice to break up, but William and the team were forced to go into that ice because we were going to arrive at the South Pole in theory, hopefully, around about January the 11th. So that was that was what was happening. We didn't know anything, we knew nothing. We'd spoken to no one physically from the outside world for a year. So we we were coming into the pole hoping, well, you know, there'll be a plane there to collect us. So this was incredible in today's knowledge of saying, well, if you were even at the pole now, you'd be sort of sending a WhatsApp saying, Sort of William, how's it all going on the ship? But we knew nothing, they knew nothing, and everything in our lives was about to change.

SPEAKER_02 40:35

There was a sequence of events that I tell you it started with the with the delay to the to the aircraft. That resulted in the weather changing, which it does in Antarctica in in a few minutes, and that ice, which had been a runway, became a pressure point on the boat. So there was some concern, a little bit of concern about that. We were you know monitoring the the wind all the time, and we'd been in many, many similar situations over the past two years where we had manoeuvred our way out of ice quite successfully. So there wasn't at the beginning at least too much concern, but things did start to develop and faces looked a little bit more anxious. To the extent that within a few hours we passed from that moment of, you know, in life sometimes that you think this can't be happening, and then it does. So yeah, our aircraft runway, which was a huge, great floating piece of ice, started to move because the wind had changed, and we were twelve hours later than we should have been. That created a certain amount of pressure on the hull of the ship, which was started to get a little bit squeezed. But at first we weren't too worried because we'd done it before 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 uh there were some rather strange sounds coming from the inside of the ship, creaking sounds, which we hadn't heard before, too, or not that loud anyway. And then 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. I never thought I'd hear that, and I never thought that I would be involved in something like that.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

We're gonna leave it there. William, will you be able to come back and share the rest of the story in a future edition?

SPEAKER_02 42:17

I would absolutely love to. That would be great.

SPEAKER_00 42:20

Robert, do you have any closing words? William, please join us for part two. It's been great to see you again. And thanks, Dan, and really thanks to everyone out there who is listening to us. But thank you all for taking the time and and having belief and support for what we're trying to do. The world has problems, real challenges, and I understand the temptation is to get angry and hopeless or both. But as we all know, anger and hopelessness never changes anything, at least not in a constructive way. What changes the world is hope and inspiration and information. That is the point of the Thin Ice podcast. Dan and I are two friends learning new things every day and working to spread a positive message that everyday people can do great things, and we together can do even greater things, like making a commitment to protect the remaining wild spaces on Earth, especially Antarctica, and together to build a more civilized and caring world.

SPEAKER_01 43:39

Thin Ice is produced by Robert Swann and Dan Smith. Theme music is by Etienne Roussel, and Bernadette Desiato keeps us on schedule. Editing was handled by yours truly, and I hope you'll give me a break because I'm still learning the software. You can find us on most podcast platforms, online, and on Substack at thinice.eart. It's all a in progress, but life usually is. We'd love to hear your comments. Until next time, keep Earth Wild, be kind, and chill out.