The Crossing of Antarctica. The Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1955-1958, by Sir Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1958. 328 pages; 30 color photographs, 63 black- and-white photographs, 9 maps. Price $7.50.

This book makes it possible to understand the monumental planning, effort, endurance, comradeship, mechanical skill, strength, and determination that were needed to accomplish under superb leadership the 2158- mile journey across the Antarctic continent by the British Commonwealth Expedition. Nor should we forget to mention the American Sno-Cats and Weasels which bucked sastrugi and straddled crevasses to enable the transpolar trek to take place.

It is a story of men and machines, of cooperation and technology, of patience and ingenuity. The expedition was faced with a crisis right at the start. The ship "Theron” landed the advance party on the ice of Vahsel Bay in January 1956 after a bad delay by pack ice. The "Theron” had to leave shortly to avoid the freeze-up, and eight men remained to spend the winter in tents and a Sno-Cat packing crate. After the ship was gone, an ice-floe broke away from the base with 300 drums of fuel, a Ferguson tractor, all the coal, the lumber for the workshop, the boat, and many other stores.

As the story unfolds, the master plan fits into place. Fuchs tells how he established Shackleton Base on one side of the continent and set up an advance base at "South Ice,” 350 miles inland on the ice cap. His methodical prose now gives way to the more breezy style which has endeared Hillary to us, as "Ed” describes the completion of Scott Base on the other side of Antarctica. Both leaders had next to reconnoiter the terrain inland from the Bases, and Fuchs encountered some frightful crevasse areas which were all but impossible to traverse. Finally in October and November 1957, the two parties set out for the South Pole, where they met in January 1958 at the United States encampment. Fuchs then continued back on Hillary’s tracks to Scott Base to complete the first traverse of the mighty frozen plateau of Antarctica, and to be greeted by a swarm of photographers !

The entanglements and appurtenances of modern life were with the voyagers at all times. They frequently talked by radio-telephone with their relatives. When Pratt fell sick with carbon monoxide poisoning, two American planes promptly brought cylinders of oxygen and expert advice from a respiratory physiologist. And when Scott’s camp was visited at Cape Evans, to bring it into a fit condition it was necessary to clean up the monumental accumulation of litter left by earlier callers!

The book is carefully and lucidly written. It is of great interest to all mountaineers and it is a work of historical importance. Most of all, it describes absorbingly the complex new weapons of man in his struggle with some of the severest forces of Nature.

Thomas H. Jukes