EXPEDITION! TV SHOW

[Music] Expedition true stories of man's quest for the unknown through the steaming jungles across the burning desert to the depths of treacherous seas and to the highest mountains of the world Expedition actual films of the great Expeditions of our time recorded as they happened your host is the famous deepsea diver author and Explorer Colonel John D Craig and here is Colonel Craig our Expedition tonight is a big one big in size importance and drama the project was to establish a scientific station at the bottom of the world 39 men live 15 months in total isolation in temperatures down to 60 below zero tonight we will see the actual films of this dramatic expedition to the Frozen [Music] continent our destination tonight is the Antarctic in November 1956 our Navy transported 39 men to the ice choked Waters of the wed sea their job was to establish Ellsworth station our largest scientific base during the international geophysical year their observations affected everything from weather forecast to our knowledge of radiation I've been in a lot of remote and Barren areas in the world but it's still hard for me to imagine the kind of loneliness these men must have felt without trees or flowers or even ordinary green grass in the Antarctic there is nothing but white in every direction in 15 months this could get on your nerves and in a tough situation like this success or failure depends on the kind of man who leads you and our men were fortunate to have as their leader a wonderful man one of the world's foremost explorers Captain Finn ronne US Navy Reserve here now is Captain Ronnie's own account then was November 1956 we had boarded two Navy vessels the cargo ship USS wot and the Icebreaker USS Staten Island there are 39 of us bound from the tip of South America for the wed sea 6,000 tons of equipment more than 600 US Navy men to get safely through the ice pack and help us build our Outpost Captain James Elliott commander of our ice breaker it's up to him and his men to force a path through the ice where no ship has ever penetrated our destination Edith ronand an icy Wilderness the size of Texas named in honor of my wife who wintered here with me 10 years before Heavy Seas We Roll almost 60° to either side groans from our scientists who can't wait to get the solid ice of Ellsworth station under their feet emerald green Seas six stories high smash over our bow even hit the High Bridge the Seas leave every muscle in our bodies aching as the sea calms down it gets colder and colder icebergs beautiful silent dangerous Guardians Of The wetle Sea our companions here are killer whales 30 ft long they look playful enough but they'll attack anything alive down here they're deadly enemies of seals and Penguins we reach pis the unknown Frontier we shoot the sun to determine our exact position the ice pack gets heavier by the mile two Navy helicopters are out on constant control Scouting For openings through the treacherous ice bag this is the Weddle sea dread obstacle to Expeditions of the past whose ships were marooned and crushed by the tremendous pressure of millions of tons of Shifting ice Pang our vessels shudder with the impact of the heavy ice to get these pictures of the Staten Island steel clad bough smashing into the ice the men rigged up a chair for me suspended from a cran it was an eerie feeling floating a few feet above this Frozen moonscape which I had scouted from the air on my 1947 Expedition the struggle of ship against ice grows [Music] harder constant watch for shifting ice which might hit our propeller blades and snap them off Full Speed Ahead into a wall of ice pack ice forced together into an impenetrable Fortress wall 40 ft High [Music] we're stuck not even a battleship could smash through this barrier our propeller blades are badly chipped behind us the pressure builds up and cracks the number two hold of the W do worse we lose a helicopter on takeoff fortunately there are no casualties but we're stuck here for 11 days yet in all this desolation there is life from a depth of over 3,000 ft we bring up an amazing variety of sea life normally found in tropical waters starfish Marine worms sea urchins seaes shrimps imagine from water only a degree or two above freezing from the very bottom of the icy vle sea snails clams corals scallops an amazing Discovery in miles at least we weren't far from where Ellsworth station was supposed to have been set up but one last reconnaissance flight convinced me there wasn't a chance in the world to force that ice barrier we could go no further I landed on the flight deck of the Staton Island and we held a quick conference the decision back track turn the ships around and battle our way 400 long miles to the other end of Edith ronand to try it again there after 43 days at Sea after what had seemed like an endless hopeless battle against the ice we finally found a low area in a wide barrier Rising for miles 200 ft above the water for some of us the past month and a half has been the longest of Our Lives lives now this is it we must make up for lost time land our men in our supplies quickly before the eyes can shift and trap our Navy vessels every hour counts thousands of tons of equipment roll to the site of elworth station a tough job in intense cold even so one of us have time to claim our ice Highway for his native State Highway 80 Illinois [Music] the sailors and seab bees swarm ashore with our scientists and technicians to build our city prefab building after building Rises quickly in this icy Wilderness like a modern Miracle living quarters completed February 1957 the basic skeleton of elworth is finished an American Town 39 inhabitants in a moving ceremony Captain Edwin McDonald commander of the two Navy ships that brought us safely down here to the bottom of the world officially turns elworth over to the 39 of us for me this isn't the first time I'm left standing on the ice watching our last physical contact with the outside world pull away it's still a mighty lonely feeling when the Navy left Elsworth was 60% complete the rest is up to us and with a long polar KN approaching there's not a moment to be lost our rwind Tower to pick up balloon signals emergency buildings are set up where we might survive The Long Winter night in case of fire or some other disaster loads of snow to be melted for water supply a thousand details each vital for our survival the Aurora Tower to investigate and photograph air glow and polar lights known to affect radio communic ations the world over physicist Kim mville of San Francisco will have to reset that Sky camera of his a dozen times each day from now [Music] on one day our city is miraculously complete Laboratories living quarters Tunnels for streets a city in the ice in search of knowledge ready now for the long night the sun dips below the northern Horizon the beginning of four months of polar Darkness outside howling winds and heavy snow drifts inside Jim Hannah our able Navy electrician from amarilla Texas gives us light his generators are powerful enough to serve a good-sized city our quarters are kept warm by jet heaters fed by oil the fuel drums are stored conveniently in the tunnels that serve as Streets between the buildings so our men don't have to venture outside still even in the tunnels the temperature is 52 below zero it's the job of our Aviation Group to refill the fuel tanks with hand pumps every day at 400 [Music] p.m. in the long Antarctic night food is vital not only for the stomach but for morale Sundays we had a wonderful brunch when each of us ordered anything his heart desired no problem thanks to the Navy no matter how outrageous the request our cook Ed Davis from Clinton Iowa always whipped up something tasty one of our men was wild for Stakes six filets every Sunday seven Sundays in a row that ended it he kind of lost his craving for steak after that personally I never got over all the luxury we enjoyed at Ellsworth a far cry from my previous Antarctic expeditions and what fine bread hot and fresh from the oven every morning how we used to dream of such Delicacies and our dog sled Expeditions of the past these are my own quarters more than once they were a quiet corner of home not only for me but for many of my men a refuge where we could sometimes forget the black winter night outside but night or day the scientific mission for which we'd left our homes and families went on around the clock the gravimetric pull of the earth is computed by a physicist from Wisconsin Dr Edward theel at left such readings were made simultaneously all over the world and fed into one single Center for evaluation another mystery we probed were the weird sounds from space we call whistlers they're believed to start in the far north through lightning then travel all the way to the Antarctic we picked them up amplifi them a million times and then Jack Brown who comes from Wilmington Delaware recorded them on tape someday perhaps these curious sounds will be used as a force in worldwide [Music] Communications we have not only our work but also plenty of hobbies to take our minds off lonely thoughts the Navy had thought of everything but even so four months of darkness have gotten on our nerves we talked of the coming son like well like a long awaited male order bride and Jim Hannah decided to give the sun some real competition with a shining Globe all of his own now the sun comes up and instead of months of darkness it's the other extreme sunlight by day sunlight By Night glare and sunlight that never stops our first big project exploration in the big snow cats which crawl almost to the edge of disaster we'll rejoin the men of Ellsworth in just a moment [Music] daylight returns with a roar winds up to 100 m an hour once again we Hoist the stars and stripes we had lowered it at sundown sun down 4 months ago our tractors work around the clock to free us from the heavy snows that buried our camp in The Long Winter [Music] night and now we know that spring is really here right next door to our camp we find a baby seal born just minutes before we watched that little fella grow to twice its newborn size in just 14 days one day Mom decides it's time for junior to learn to swim she finds a spot where the ice is thin and breaks through into the slush and she calls and calls but no matter how she coaxes Junior doesn't feel like taking a dip not just [Music] yet Jim Hannah the first Texan ever to ride an Antarctic [Music] seal the rayn Tower with its radar antenna in the plastic Dome winter and summer plucking radio signals from the sky from our upper air balloon investigations hundreds thousands of balloons all over the Frozen continent millions of coated beeps American Russian British Norwegian the beeps are decoded the information pulled result weather forecast maps of value to the entire world our mission ranges far into the Antarctic Wilderness our Traverse party goes out with snowcats and sleds led by a miracle of modern polar exploration electronic crass detectors to spot the dangerous Cliffs hidden beneath the snow through a desert of Eternal ice past mountain ranges black against the snow 9,000 ft High theirs is the toughest job of all 10 grinding miles a day sometimes through blizzards always through blinding desolation 50 below 60 below every few miles a stop in the freezing cold to probe another secret another page added to notebooks growing fat with new knowledge to measure gravity and temperatures chart unknown territory determine depth and density of snow and ice and the solid rock beneath small Comfort to learn that millions of years ago this was a temperate zone with lush green vegetation 20 days 30 50 in the field every 10 miles a deep pit to be dug by hand to study the layers of snow which tell polar history as surely as the Rings in a tree relate the story of its life another stop a small plane overhead and male male 4 months old but a brief moment of home not always do things run so smoothly near disaster are precious machines teetering precariously above a 400t deep crass one more foot and our men would have tumbled helplessly into the depths of the ice without any chance of rescue elworth station picks up a radio call for help our Air Force plane flies us to the aid of the stranded Traverse [Music] party against a dramatic backdrop of jagged polar mountains our men unload food and fuel for our scientists in the field these men covered 800 tough Uncharted miles in 80 Days all told before they finally got back to our [Music] base feverish activity at the base 42 below hot air ducts blow the ice from our planes our mission is a dramatic One By Radio we hear the famous British Commonwealth trans Antarctic expedition of Dr Vivian fuches has been stalled in its Journey to the pole in territory riddled by crevasses so difficult did the unexplored terrain turn out to be that their supply of gasoline was dangerously depleted we are glad to help a fellow Explorer and volunteer to take them extra equipment and 1,500 gallons of fuel we fly along a polar mountain range all through the summer we had mapped such mountains which no man has ever seen [Music] before and there below us the fukes Expedition their powerful tractors useless for the moment Dr fuches himself serve Vivian fuches now bearded cheerful clad in his heavy white sweater the man who was to fulfill the long cherished dream of anti an Arctic explorers the crossing of the Frozen continent on land 2,000 mil from the wed sea to McMurdo sound Dr fukes and his party cheerfully pitch in to help unload the precious fuel they wave their thanks we wave good luck and we're off below us flows the giant Glacier that had given the tractors of the fuches Expedition so much trouble on its Journey mountains again silent unclimbed Sentinels of the Frozen continent then below us an Antarctic Nursery 8,000 One Fine Day a Navy helicopter drops in on Ellsworth station [Music] out steps an old friend Captain McDonald who brought us here more than a year ago with him again the ussy and do to drop Replacements and take us back my final message to the United States on our ham radio to my wife in Washington DC see Mission completed we're coming [Music] home there's something that struck me while seeing this inspiring film tonight in recent years a lot of us have developed an inferiority complex about the scientific achievements of other countries but I think the men of Ellsworth proed that we can face danger and hardships for the sake of knowledge alone just as well as anybody else captain ronne and his men brought back a great deal of scientific knowledge that made a vital contribution to the international geophysical year their work continues because the Frozen continent turned out to be of tremendous importance to worldwide Communications and weather observations in weeks to come we'll follow some of the the great Expeditions of our time to many other remote regions of the world in just a moment we'd like you to see preview scenes from some of these wonderful films in weeks to come we'll join the BBC Expedition into Africa's Kalahari Desert to search for the last of the legendary Bushmen we'll join an underwater Expedition off the shores of turkey and discover the oldest shipwreck ever found 3,000 years old we'll go to the remote Highlands of New Guinea with a Swiss expedition to find tribes still living in the Stone Age we'll join a lap land family as they drive their 1500 reindeer through the icy waters of an Arctic Fjord in a desperate fight for survival we'll go to the Brazilian jungle for an actual first contact with an Indian tribe more feared than the head hunters of the Amazon we'll climb one of the highest mountains in the world lce [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] a