SOUTH POLE CROSSING
Shackleton relative drives a Hyundai Santa Fe across Antarctica
Leaning against a weathered Edwardian hut at Cape Royds in Antarctica, looking more wooden cart wheel than car wheel after a century in a polar deep freeze, remains a legacy of the first passenger car to drive in Antarctica.
The 12/15 Arrol-Johnston joined Ernest Shackleton’s unsuccessful Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole in 1907. Its modifications included non-freeze oil, a silencer designed to act as foot warmer and skis for the front wheels. Taking the Scottish-made car to the Antarctic seemed more publicity stunt than a practical form of polar transport.
If Shackleton was the Antarctic’s first motorist, it is fitting that a member of his family should be the first person to take a passenger car right across the south polar continent, 110 years after that first expedition.
Patrick Bergel is Shackleton’s great-grandson. Despite having the Shackleton DNA, by his own admission he is no explorer; he is a media company entrepreneur from London who is more accustomed to braving the Tube than far-flung corners of the planet.
Yet earlier this year (kept secret until successful), he became the first person to take a passenger car right across the Antarctic — a Hyundai Santa Fe with added balloon tires and a big fuel tank.
Taking a month to cover a distance one-and-a-half times the width of the Atlantic, it was a huge challenge, especially for someone who rarely drives.
Invited by the expedition-obsessed vice-chairman of Hyundai, Bergel was enticed by the opportunity to go in Shackleton’s footsteps.
“This was a proper expedition with a challenge to accomplish what nobody else had done before,” Bergel says. “So it was a fairly easy decision to go. It was the right time for me and I grabbed it.”
Bergel wasn’t able to take anything of his great-grandfather’s along for the ride, but he found a way to keep the connection.
“I couldn’t take any original artifacts with me,” he said when we met in a London restaurant. “There was a compass, but unfortunately it is uninsurable and the first editions, memoirs and so on were not very Antarctic-friendly. So I took the diaries with me … on a Kindle! Reading them there meant much more than reading them in London.”
The team’s Hyundai Santa Fe was adapted by expedition leader Gísli Jónsson from Arctic Trucks in Iceland, one of the most experienced Antarctic explorers of this century. He has spent the past five years exploring the hostile, remote and icy world at the bottom of the Earth and, when approached to take a regular road car into this environment, his initial impression was that it couldn’t be done.
“People who have a lot of experience of Antarctica know what it does to machinery; basically, anything and everything falls apart,” Jónsson says. “Even the big machines crack up and break apart, skis fall off, tracks snap and gearboxes fail.
“This was the first time this full traverse has ever been attempted, let alone doing it there and back. There are established routes to the South Pole and to the base station at McMurdo, but no passenger car has done anything remotely close to what we planned to take on.”
The Hyundai makeover included fitting giant heavy-duty low-pressure tires to make it float over the icy rugged surface, spreading its weight until it could run over someone’s hand without them feeling it. The car’s body had to be raised, with new subframes and suspension, and gears were fitted inside the wheel hubs to cope with the different forces and the need to turn more slowly to run at the same speed.
“Other than that, it was a pretty standard Santa Fe,” Jónsson says. “The engine, the management system, the transmission, front differential and driveshaft were all completely standard. We increased the fuel tank capacity to 230 litres, ran on Jet A-1 fuel and installed an engine pre-heater to help in the extreme cold.”
The expedition was timed to commemorate the centenary of Ernest Shackleton’s heroic TransAntarctic journey of 1914 to 1917. Having been beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen, Shackleton founded an expedition to cross the continent, but their ship sank in pack ice, forcing the 28-strong party to live on its wits for more than a year.
In temperatures down to -28 C, Bergel was sometimes in the car 20 hours a day, refuelling at aviation fuel dumps en route, including one at the South Pole. Bergel opened a bottle of champagne at the bottom of the world and was feted by the scientists living there. The Shackleton name still elicits kudos at the Pole.
Crossing the Leverett Glacier to the Traverse, they passed the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, then skirted the smoking Mount Erebus volcano, which Shackleton had been the first person to climb in 1908. From there the expedition broke new ground as they drove onto the Ross Ice Shelf, which is laced with deep fissures that can remain unseen until the moment a car tips over into the abyss. This threat forced the team to tie their vehicles together as a precaution that might allow them to pull one another to safety.
“We’d been briefed with up-todate satellite imagery of where the crevasses were in relation to our GPS route, but it was still a worry,” Bergel says.
The other big challenge was the whiteouts, where visibility dropped to just a few metres and when the tiredness from long days on the ice took its toll.
“The driving was incredible,” Bergel says. “There’s no visual stimulus and with your body connected to the vehicle, your brain goes a bit haywire. I started to make up things, like seeing trees and forests around me, and after one 20-hour driving day, despite doing shifts, I was falling into the steering wheel and the tracks in front of me kept flipping in and out.”
In all, the team endured 30 days of pummelling terrain, with those 20-hour days in the extremes of climate and topography.
“From previous experience, we were expecting more trouble,” Jónsson admits. “The expedition was exceptionally well prepared. Do that and you prevent the drama. The longest repair stop we had was 45 minutes because of a loose bolt.
“A lot of people thought we would never ever make it, and when we returned they were shaking our hands … they just couldn’t believe we’d actually done it!”
Bergel, for whom it had been an emotional journey, adds: “Compared to what my great-grandfather did, this was one-thousandth as hard and I don’t think we’re under any illusions about that.
“No comparison, we had modern appurtenances, comparative luxury and an amazing vehicle. But it’s still quite something to be the first to do this in a wheeled passenger vehicle.”