“Arrivals and Departures” – (continued)
For three weeks while the ship was in harbour we had been working round the clock, unloading the cargo by open boat (for there was no way of berthing the ship alongside), sorting and stacking the three years of fuel and supplies, building and fitting out our hut and ensuring that the wireless was fully operational. Standing on the rocks behind the hut to watch the ship depart was about the only free time we had to look at our new environment.
I know, reading my diary, on the day that the ship departed I was full of wondering thoughts about what the next two years had in store for us. I suppose I had more inkling than any of the others of what to expect for Alfred Stephenson the surveyor and Launcelot Fleming the Geologist and Chaplain of the British Graham Land Expedition were friends of mine and the expedition book “Southern Lights” had been with me throughout the war.
For anyone who has lived and worked with dogs in the Antarctic, the day that one leaves to go home and face up to saying goodbye to one’s dogs is undoubtedly traumatic. For a year or more, building up and looking after one’s dog team was a privilege, a pleasure, a duty and a great relaxation. A privilege because there were always fewer teams than people to run them, a pleasure because the rewards for one’s efforts were so apparent for all to see; duty, for the success of any base was measured in large part by the field work that was achieved and field work depended on having good teams able to go anywhere at short notice; a relaxation because in moments of personal tension that are inevitable in a small group of people living close with little privacy it was the uninhibited welcome that one received from the dogs that helped one unwind.
I recall very well the last two days that I spent on Stonington Island in early 1948; it was two years almost to the day since we had first arrived in 1946 and the scene of the ship departing, leaving ten men ashore waving it goodbye was being repeated all over again.
On this occasion I was joining the outgoing ship and the incomers were taking over a fully-operational working base. Instead of the motley collection of 35 untrained and ill-disciplined huskies that we had started with, we were leaving them with nearly 100 dogs. We had trained them into working teams; they were well cared for, fit and well disciplined. We had been taught well by Ted Bingham and we in turn had trained our dogs and were proud of them. We knew that we were passing on teams that in their own way would be able to train their new owners just as we had trained the dogs during the two years that were just ending. We had arrived as a random collection of people, as random as the dogs, and we left as a team of great friends. Much of this we owed to our dogs.
In 1948 there was no sign of the sea ice breaking out and the nearest open water was 30 miles to the West. If the ship could not reach us we faced a further year of isolation. Luckily there was a US Navy Icebreaker in our area (it was there largely to rescue an American girl from a nearby base who was pregnant but that is another story). The icebreaker was able to force a passage through the ice to our base and late one evening we saw it coming in with our ship in tow rounding the point and I realised that in a few hours I would be leaving. The ship expected to be in the harbour for only a few hours and in the chaos of unloading the cargo I could expect to do little more than introduce my dogs to a new arrival, hand over 8 pages of instructions of how to drive my team to the new “owner” and wave them goodbye as I left.
It was a very sad goodbye and I know that I wept that night. I know now that since that day hundreds of members of the Survey have had to go through the same sad goodbyes over the 50 years of dog driving that forms the basis of this book.
I had covered some hundreds of miles with my own team, The Orange Bastards (all teams had names, Darkies Boys, The Gangsters, The Black Gang or just the “odds and sods”) I had built up my team over two years largely from odds and sods that nobody wanted and I was very proud of them. At one stage I had no less than 11 dogs who were compatible with each other.
I always felt that my lead dog Rover was second best on the base. No lead dog could equal “Darkie” who had been first identified by Ted Bingham from the motley collection of dogs that we had brought down from Labrador. Darkie was a veritable leader of leaders and over the years he was used to train all the other leaders.
In a way I owed my life to Rover. I recall one particular day when I had taken a risk and planned a 38-mile day across some rather unstable sea ice that had not been consolidated by an onshore gale (unconsolidated ice is always nasty). We started very early to ensure that we were not forced to camp at half distance. In the afternoon we were visited by a light aircraft and I was told to send back to base my experienced companion and accept in return an American who had never slept in a tent, let alone travelled behind a dog team. The sea ice was so thin that the pilot broke through it when he stepped off the aircraft ski. The surface was hard, the sledge was running well, the visibility was good but it was bitterly cold with signs of an offshore wind developing on the mountain tops. We had 9 miles to go to the safety of an ice-covered island and it would be dark in 3 hours. Rover somehow sensed the urgency of the situation and he pulled as hard as I had ever seen him do, picking his way among the broken ice without hesitating. I think he guessed we were going home and was stimulated by the rocks of the islands that relieved the utter whiteness of everything else. We arrived just before dark – half an hour to spare. Almost as soon as I had pegged the dogs out, fed them and established camp the offshore wind increased significantly. 12 hours later when we woke all the ice had gone out to sea. If we had been camped on it we would have gone with it.
Rover the team leader was basically an intelligent coward. He knew that if he kept his lead trace tight the team’s “boss” dog, Bouncer could never catch him. He quickly learned how to react to my shouted orders to move left or right and could maintain an astonishingly accurate compass course with very little prompting from me. Bouncer was the boss, a tough character with a broken ear and as far as he was concerned the team bitch “Sister” was his private property. Bouncer I am sure only pulled because he always hoped he would catch Rover, two years in front of him. Then came 3 brothers, the “red” dogs, Rory, Red and Rhu who worked as a gang and ran a sort of self-appointed trade union protection racket. As a threesome they were bullies; as individuals they were cowards. Brother, a gentle brindle dog made up the foursome with the “reds”. Then there were two-year old puppies. One had been badly mauled as a month-old pup but our doctor had done an excellent repair job and he made a good recovery. His name was Simon, a very friendly and hard-working dog but as thick as a plank. The other year-old puppy was a bitch called Mukluk. She had been born in a blizzard and warmed up inside a mukluk boot hung up by the stove inside the hut, hence her name. As an extra, right at the back, pulling on a very short trace, was a splendid old warrior Snipe. To keep him company we borrowed on occasions a flighty black and white botch called Winnie and her company did him a power of good. He was an “original” from Labrador, too old to be used for breeding, a splendid old dog who just liked to be left alone and appreciated it if one thanked him personally after a long day.
Over the 50 years of the existence of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) this “changeover” was repeated many times The sadness of saying goodbye to dogs with whom we had shared our lives and our safety, wondering if the newcomers would appreciate the teams which we were passing on, probably being not quite sure what had hit them in being responsible for their own team of dogs.
The newcomer who drove my team away was in fact David Dalgleish and many of my team were included in his team known as “The Odds and Sods”. His description of that chaotic changeover is best described in his own words. (See David’s account, ‘Arrivals & Departures’ in 1948).
Kevin Walton, Stonington 1946 & 1947