18 minute read
Recollections from the first ENDEAVOUR
from Royal New Zealand Navy | Navy Today – Issue 261, December 2021
“That image brings back memories,” says Bob Pinker, former crewman of netlayer HMNZS ENDEAVOUR (I), the Royal New Zealand Navy’s first Antarctic supply vessel.
When HMNZS AOTEAROA heads to Antarctica next year, it will be the first visit and resupply to McMurdo by an RNZN ship in over fifty years. Editor Andrew Bonallack talks to former crewmen about the first missions to Antarctica in the late fifties.
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He’s looking at the image opposite, taken in the beginning of 1958 near Cape Evans, Antarctica. “In the bow, facing aft, is Able Seaman EA ‘Tug’ Wilson, while on the left rowing is Chief Joiner E Voison.” He recognizes Able Seaman Brian ‘Brushes’ Nolan on the oars on the right, notable for being the youngest RNZN seaman to serve in the Korean War at age 16. The closest person to the camera is Able Seaman Ray Tito. A year earlier, A/B Tito had hoisted the flag at the new Scott Base, built to support New Zealand’s participation in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1957–1958, the overland crossing of the continent by British explorer Vivian Fuchs with Sir Edmund Hillary in support.
In the picture, the crew are on their way to Scott’s Hutt at Cape Evans to screw a brass plaque to the hut. “I’m in the boat somewhere. I had a special drill the Navy gave me, and I wouldn’t lend it to Voison.”
This was during EM1 Pinker’s second trip to Antarctica, on board ENDEAVOUR I, also the ship’s second mission to the continent (1957/58). The wooden-hulled ship had been purchased and commissioned to transport and support the Expedition and a year earlier (1956/57) had transported Sir Edmund Hillary and his team, Hillary’s Massey tractors, two aircraft, dog teams and the components for Scott Base, which the ENDEAVOUR crew helped build. In the 1957/58 season, Hillary used the tractors to create supply depots between Scott Base and the Pole for Fuchs’ transcontinental journey from the opposite side of Antarctica (Hillary famously decided to continue on and reach the Pole before Fuchs). Mr Pinker ultimately did nine trips to Antarctica in his Navy career. In 1956 he remembers boarding ENDEAVOUR in Bluff in December, with 18 dogs and a load of mutton for dog food. He says ENDEAVOUR had stopped at Wellington, Lyttelton, Dunedin, apparently fundraising for the Expedition on the way down from Devonport. “We had about 50 fruitcakes donated from a local high school, and schoolgirls were knitting us gloves and scarves to take with us.” Mr Pinker had obtained a 16mm projection licence, in order for him to show movies on the trip down. “We didn’t celebrate Christmas until 29 December, when the ship stopped in the ice. I’ve got a picture of Hillary sitting on the ice next to the ship eating Christmas dinner.” He remarks that the White Ensign they sailed under was a different one than today (the Navy Ensign changed from the Royal Navy White Ensign to the New Zealand version in 1968). “I remember the crow’s nest often was in a ball of strange colours they called St Elmo’s Fire.”
His nine trips including missions in the second HMNZS ENDEAVOUR, the former USS NAMAKAGON (AOG-53) that he helped deliver from the United States to New Zealand in 1962. He says in January 1957 the USS NESPELEN (AOG-55), a sister ship to the NAMAKAGON, berthed alongside them in McMurdo Sound, and he reckons that inspired the purchase. “ENDEAVOUR I was very comfortable,” he says. “She was a diesel electric ship and a wooden ship, she wasn’t cold like a steel ship. She made very little water, and the galley got most of it. There’s no water in Antarctica. It took a gallon of diesel to make a gallon of water. But we had plenty of beer – Leopard lager.” Mr Pinker had received training in diesel electric engines in Australia, at a time when the usual propulsion was steam turbine. It made him valuable for both ENDEAVOUR I and II.
There are a variety of stories of clashes between Sir Edmund and the ship’s Commanding Officer, Captain Harry Kirkwood RN. “I remember Hillary wanted to send messages out without the Captain’s approval and the Captain said, there’s only one captain on this ship. Get down below.” This acrimony is something Ann Nolan, Brian’s widow, remembers from her husband’s stories.
Above: HMNZS ENDEAVOUR I stops for Christmas. Sir Edmund Hillary is in the dark blue on the left eating Christmas lunch. Photo supplied by Bob Pinker.
“What Captain Kirkwood said was law,” says Mrs Nolan. “He was a cleanliness fanatic which was a good thing on a ship but that is where Hillary and Kirkwood’s friendship came to grief. Hillary was not used to such a regime of cleanliness and Kirkwood’s rules were “my ship, my rules, like it or leave” and everyone accepted that except Hillary. “Captain Kirkwood loved the ship as he had captained it when it belonged to the Falklands Dependency and called the JOHN BISCOE. He was a real English gentleman and the crew referred to him as “my father”. He was such a nice man and kept in touch with Brian and I after he retired in England. He used to say that he would sail anywhere in the world on that ship.” A classmate of Mr Pinker’s, LME Mervyn Tyree, was also among the delivery crew for ENDEAVOUR II, and thinks he and Bob are the only two of that crew left alive. He also notes they are the only two people left who have stood on the decks on all three ENDEAVOURs, thanks to the pair being invited to the decommissioning of fleet tanker ENDEAVOUR III (which never went to Antarctica) in 2017. He remembers ‘bad years’ when the ice was so bad the ships couldn’t get into McMurdo. “Everything would have to be offloaded, to go into sledges towed by tractors. It could be 11 miles.” The second ENDEAVOUR was a huge improvement, he says, but it wasn’t really designed for the ice. “After one mission, you could see the ice had pushed in the hull against the ribs, all the way along.” Another former sailor, Geoffrey Bourke, was a junior watchkeeper in ENDEAVOUR I for the 1958/59 mission to Antarctica. He served in the Navy from 1951 to 1985, finishing as a Commander. He’s not so sure the ship was that comfortable. “We had bunks, but the sailors used to take their hammocks because it was more comfortable. She had a round bottom and would roll.”
From top: HMNZS ENDEAVOUR in Antarctica; Ice building up on ENDEAVOUR I (1958); Sled dogs on the deck of ENDEAVOUR I, 1958.
The crew would be acclimatised to the cold by the time they got to McMurdo. “The ship wasn’t airconditioned or any nonsense like that. It could be beautiful outside if the wind wasn’t blowing. You could be wearing a pair of shorts with heavy boots and socks, playing soccer. The penguins would come up to you, because they hadn’t seen a human before.”
When they reached McMurdo, they would come alongside the ice. “The trucks would come alongside, the stores people would unload all the stuff, and the trucks would drive back to McMurdo. It was a chain gang of trucks, going around and around until the ship left.” Two things struck him about the continent. “Mt Erebus, which looked like a hill but was higher than Mt Cook. And there’s nothing red. It takes a while for you to notice that. That’s why an orange snowcat stands out for miles and miles.”
ENDEAVOUR paid off on 7 November 1961 and was sold to Shaw Steam Ship Co. in Canada the following year. Renamed ARCTIC ENDEAVOUR, she was used for sealing in the Arctic until she sank at her moorings in November 1982 and was broken up in 1983. ENDEAVOUR II decommissioned in 1971.
From top: The crew photograph Emperor penguins (1958); British explorer Vivian Fuchs’ Tucker 6.5-tonne Sno-cats are loaded onto ENDEAVOUR I, not long after the successful overland crossing of Antarctica (completed 2 March 1958).
HMNZS Endeavour was a Royal New Zealand Navy Antarctic support vessel. She was the first of three ships in the Royal New Zealand Navy to bear that name.
The ship was built in the United States in 1944 as Satinwood (YN-89) as a net tender of the Ailanthus class (but later redesignated as AN-76, a net layer) and transferred to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease in August 1944. Commissioned as HMS Pretext (Z284), she served the United Kingdom until she was returned to United States Navy custody in November 1945. Sold by the United States Maritime Commission in 1947, she served as a research vessel for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey under the name SV John Biscoe. She was briefly renamed Pretext when another ship was assigned the John Biscoe name, before being sold to the Royal New Zealand Navy, renamed Endeavour, and employed in supporting the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition and subsequent New Zealand research activities in Antarctica. Sold again in 1962, the ship, renamed Arctic Endeavour for sealing work in the northern hemisphere, foundered off the coast of Canada in November 1982.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMNZS_Endeavour_(1944)
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