The New Zealand flag is raised outside the Scott Bass mess hut on January 20, 1957. It was hoisted on a mast used by Robert Scott during his 1902 expedition.
* This is an edited extract from Hellbent for the Pole by Geoffrey Lee Martin to be published by Random House in September 2007 at $44.99.
Geoffrey Lee Martin was a senior reporter on the New Zealand Herald, as well as a Summer Party member of the Commonwealth Trans Antarctic Expedition, 1956-57, reporting for the NZPA. The following summer, 1957-58, he was in the Antarctic exclusively for the Herald and The Daily Telegraph, London,
and accompanied Sir Edmund to the South Pole, January 20, 1958, for the historic meeting with Dr (later Sir) Vivian Fuchs, leader of the British party.
Scott Base was a model of compactness. The six main huts were linked by covered ways giving the inhabitants easy access between buildings without needing to put on protective clothing, even during winter blizzards.
Made of curved corrugated iron, the covered ways were tied down by steel cables and lined with tins, boxes and packages of food and other equipment.
New Zealand's Ministry of Works architects had boasted that Scott Base would last 100 years. The prefabricated walls of the huts resembled refrigerators, except that they were designed to keep the cold out, insulated against 100C of frost (about minus 50C), said the architects, and built to withstand winds of more than 160km/h .
Behind the main huts, climbing the gentle slope, were the radio and smaller scientific masts and three small scientific huts.
I spent a couple of fascinating days late in January helping Jack Hoffman, our explosives expert, erect the main radio, and some other, masts. Anchoring the mast, Jack showed me, was relatively easy after we had hauled it up. We just drilled deep holes into the permafrost on Pram Pt, inserted the stays, and then poured water into the holes, which set hard instantly, firmer than concrete.
Ted Gawn and Peter Mulgrew, our two radio operators, were soon hard at work attempting to establish permanent contact with New Zealand. On February 1, our radio link was up and running and Ed sent the first telegram to his wife Louise, back in Auckland.
From then on, Scott Base was able to maintain regular daily radio schedules with New Zealand and all of us were able to send occasional brief messages home.
Five weeks later, on March 5, Scott Base made contact with Shackleton Base, occasionally enabling Ed and the British leader, Vivian Fuchs, to talk directly to each other for the first time since arriving in the Antarctic.
Inside the main mess hall at Scott Base was a 1.8m by 1.2m painting on one wall of New Zealand rural mountain country in spring, depicting a slouch-hatted shepherd with his horse and dogs herding a flock of sheep and their lambs running through the tussock. A fine contrast to the scene outside.
Colour ran riot in the bedrooms, pretty much to individual choice from a large stock of paint. The sleeping huts were cleverly arranged so that each man had, in effect, a single room.
To achieve this the bunks were placed in the centre of partitioned rooms. Then the space along the side of the top bunk was closed off and the opposite side closed on the lower bunk. This gave each L-shaped room its own window, with a writing table underneath.
