Correspondence from Antarctic traveling companion.

I recently received an email from a gentleman who also participated in the historic journey to the South Pole in 1957-58. As you may or may not know, I was part of "Operation Deep Freeze". It was an expedition through Antarctica, to the Pole and back again, ending at Scott Base, where we caught up with Sir Edmund Hillary and the Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Here is an excerpt from that email:

"G'day, Morton...

This is a voice from McMurdo Sound, 50 years ago -- I'm Geoffrey Lee Martin. You may remember we flew to the South Pole, Jan 18, 1958, with Rear Admiral George Dufek and Sir Edmund Hillary to meet Vivian Fuchs' party there on Jan 20.

I was attached to Operation Deep Freeze for that summer, representing both The Daily Telegraph, London, and the New Zealand Herald. I had been a field party member of Sir Edmund Hillary's expedition the previous summer, 1956-57, but had switched to USNavy accreditation for the 1957-58 summer to be able to report more freely for my newspapers.

I've just published a heavily illustrated (from 50-year-old Kodachrome transparancies) memoir "Hellbent for the Pole" (Random House in NZ, Allen & Unwin in Australia) which recounts what we were doing at that time. Extracts can be viewed on my website: www.hellbentforthepole.com There are two or three pix of you in the book -- including a rather handsome head-and-shoulders shot in dark glasses! I believe the Polar Times will be reviewing Hellbent in its upcoming issue.

We are all getting on a bit, now, of course (Ed Hillary, who is rather frail himself at 88, reminded me recently that "there are only eight of us left" of our original party that built Scott Base). You, I guess, would be one of the youngest survivors of those years.

Judging from your website, you've had a very interesting career after leaving the Navy. I left journalism early in the '70s to head up a medium-sized public relations firm in Sydney, but became bored and rejoined The Daily Telegraph as a foreign correspondent in the mid '80s, spending time in Italy and the Far East before establishing the Sydney bureau."