Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  But he was in a situation that seemed to be steadily deteriorating. He often omitted to wear his safety harness; there did not seem much point when the boat was almost certainly doomed anyway. While he was trying to patch up the jury mast, a breaking wave caught him unawares from behind. He was picked up off his feet and dashed cross the deck in a maelstrom of foaming water. The guard wires had vanished with the loss of the mast, so there was nothing to save him from being swept overboard. With an agonising crunch, he smashed against one of the stanchions, and was held in place as the wave poured over the side. It was a miraculous escape, but he paid a heavy price for it. Some ribs were almost certainly broken and his right arm was numb:

  ‘I dragged myself, moaning and groaning and making a great to-do, along the side deck and down below. As the wind was from the south-west, there was no need to steer. Bilge water was overflowing the floorboards, though. Cursing mentally – drawing each breath meant stabbing pain enough without aggravating it by speech – I prised up the floor and scooped up twenty-two buckets from the well to tip them into the cockpit. The rest of that pain-fringed day and a restless, chilly night I spent on my bunk, increasingly aware of the vast difference between a merely damp sleeping bag and one still soaked from the recent capsize.’

  The effort to squeeze out of the jammed hatchway and expose himself to the bitter wet and cold above decks was becoming increasingly onerous. He delayed it until the last possible minute, sought solace in an escape world of the novels he had brought with him. He could see that the jury mast was on the verge of disintegration, but put off the moment of actually doing anything about it. Another storm, another sail torn to bits, it was becoming increasingly obvious that at this rate he would run out of water, even if the boat did not founder first, before he reached any kind of haven.

  But Lewis never stopped thinking out every conceivable possibility for survival. The spinnaker pole mast was obviously hopeless. He did have one other possibility, the eleven-foot-six-inch wood boom, but he had seen no way that he could possibly have raised it into position on his own in the tossing boat. Then suddenly, at his lowest moment, when he had almost given up all hope, he saw how it could be done by rigging a system of pulleys to give him some mechanical advantage. He waited for a slackening in the weather, laid out his system of tackle and ropes, eased the boom into position and was at last ready for the crucial test. It had taken him eight and a half hours of non-stop work just to get this far. Tense with anxiety, he began to turn the winch handle:

  ‘Was the 15° angle at which the boom lay, hopefully pivoted at the mast step and supported upon the crutch at its other end, sufficient to give purchase? Yes. The boom rose a foot out of the crutch, then it slewed as the yacht lurched sharply to port and stuck fast. I could have cried. But, thank goodness, its foot had only jammed in the pin rail. On the second attempt the boom mounted steadily inch by inch to the vertical.’

  The new mast was still stunted, but it was sufficiently strong to hold enough sail to attain a reasonable speed. He now had a sporting chance of reaching safety; the most obvious course was to head north, for warmer climes and kinder seas, and then to try to reach Tierra del Fuego. Lewis gave it a thought but quickly dismissed it. He did not have the charts, but, more important, he was still determined to reach the Antarctic Peninsula. The charts and pilot tables he did have had been turned into a soggy mess by constant soakings, but he dried them out carefully, and decided that a small American station, Palmer Base, on the south side of Anvers Island, gave him the best chance of survival.

  His water supply still presented a problem. He decided on a drastic economy campaign, reducing his liquid intake to just over a pint a day. To accustom his kidneys to such a harsh routine, he went without any liquid at all for twenty-four hours and, after this, adjusted the fluid intake to maintain a concentrated dark urine. Whenever it became a normal yellow colour, he knew that he was wasting liquid. It was a question of disciplining his body to exist on the very edge of survival, an accomplishment at which David Lewis excelled and, one suspects, enjoyed in a strange way.

  At last he was making good progress. The long hours at the tiller lines were worthwhile. And slowly his body, even under these appalling conditions, was mending. His fingernails dropped off, one by one, making his hands even more tender, but also showing that the tissue was healing. His ribs became less painful and the greatest enemy now was boredom, as day followed day, with hardly an intermission of dark to mark the passage of time. He had finished most of his books, and faced hour after hour at the tiller, in a race against the steadily diminishing level of his water containers.

  As the weeks went by, he became increasingly anxious about his landfall. He had no way of knowing how accurate his only watch was. The compass had a deviation of around 20° east, because the steel framework of the cockpit had been buckled over it in the storms. If he made a quite small navigational error, he could miss Palmer Base altogether.

  As he got closer to land the nervous and physical strain became progressively worse. He spent longer and longer hours at the tiller, often peering into a near white-out of driving snow. He sighted land on 26 January, piled snow peaks, rising out of chaotic glaciers that swept down to the sea, spawning great icebergs in the dark waters. It was a sight of austere, forbidding beauty, of black, ice-veined cliffs, green, gleaming walls of ice and a total lack of human life. He had had the shadowy ice birds for company for much of the voyage; he had seen whales and porpoises but, looking at that bleak coast, it was difficult to believe that there could be a human being within a thousand miles. And yet he was looking at Anvers Island, had made a perfect landfall after over 5,000 miles at sea. His logic told him that the Antarctic base must be on the other side of that empty island. He was so close to warmth, comfort, the company of other people, and yet they were almost impossible to comprehend. In addition, he had entered the most dangerous phase of the entire voyage, even more so than that moment of capsize when the mast had been swept away.

  For two days of increasingly wearied concentration at the tiller he dodged the jagged teeth of islands, the part-hidden threat of reefs and the more obvious ones of icebergs. He was only eight miles from safety, could even see the light of Palmer Base, but now a gale blew up with the speed and ferocity that is so typical of those climes. Close to land, particularly one so forbidding, it was infinitely more dangerous than out at sea. Ice Bird weathered the gale and, as the wind dropped, Lewis could keep his eyes open no longer and collapsed on to the bunk, to wake shortly afterwards by some sixth sense, just in time to see a jagged rock skerry puncturing the sea only a few yards away on his beam.

  Another day and night at the tiller, tacking exhaustingly towards his goal, and he seemed nearly there – just a mile to go, when suddenly Ice Bird took off, tossed by a breaking wave into a chaos of spurting foam. Lewis leapt for the cockpit, but could do nothing but cling to the tiller as the boat was hurled on the crest of breaking waves over what was obviously a shoal. The keel had only to be caught once on a hidden rock and they would be tumbled, smashed, ruptured in the boiling waters. The people at Palmer Base might never even know that a yacht had come so close. And then Ice Bird was in smooth waters again. Somehow, she had come through the maelstrom. Another hour or so and she was in the sheltered waters of Arthur Harbour. It was 28 January 1973. The buildings, with that impermanent prefabricated look common to all structures in the far south and north, were still as silent as if they had been abandoned. A small converted minesweeper was moored to the pier. This also, was lifeless, as Ice Bird, rusted, battered and dirty, sidled in under her rags of sail, to drop anchor a few yards from the sleeping vessel. It was only fear that the anchor might slip that made Lewis call out, ‘Is anyone awake? Do you mind if I tie up alongside?’

  People erupted out of the saloon door, to see the incredible apparition. Lewis himself was even more battered than his boat. His clothes were in tatters, stained with grease and petrol; matted hair and a roughly trimmed beard framed a h
ollow, emaciated face, dominated by eyes that were bright yet haunted by three months of constant struggle. David Lewis was the first man ever to sail single-handed to the Antarctic; he had also come through a battle for bare survival in which, somehow, he had never relinquished his goal. Of all the stories of sea adventures, this is one of the most remarkable.

  No less noteworthy was the sequel to the voyage. Even before reaching Anvers Island, David Lewis had begun to plan the repair of his boat so that he could continue the voyage. Within days of arrival, he had started work, repairing, improvising, replacing what was little more than a robust shell of a yacht. Once again his magnetic personality enlisted help, so that almost the entire staff of Palmer Base became involved in the recovery operation. The engine was stripped, cleaned and coaxed into working; two lengths of timber, used for battening down cargo, were shaped and glued together to make a longer mast; the temperamental cooking stove was stripped and cleaned. Even the bilge pump was repaired.

  At this point the National Geographic magazine got in touch with him, offering commissions too lucrative to turn down, so Lewis left Ice Bird in the Antarctic, returning to Anvers Island at the end of the year. He spent a hectic month in the final refit of his boat and set out once again on 12 December 1973. There were plenty more narrow escapes. To start with it was no easy matter coaxing a small yacht through the ice-jammed channels of the Antarctic Peninsula and then, clear of land, he was exposed once again to the fury of the Southern Ocean. He was caught in the eye of a hurricane at the end of his sixth week out, once again was capsized, once again lost his mast. Now, running out of time before the start of a new academic job, he decided to run for Cape Town. At least he would have completed his voyage, sailing both to and from the Antarctic continent, totally under his own way. He reached Cape Town on 20 March 1974, slipping unostentatiously into the Marina of the Royal Cape Yacht Club. There was no naval escort, no civic dignitaries or crowds. He would not have wanted it that way, and yet his voyage represents the most outstanding achievement of endurance, ingenuity and superb seamanship in the history of small boat sailing.

  David Lewis flew back to Australia, but Barry, his son, finished off the long voyage of Ice Bird, sailing her single-handed across the Southern Ocean back to Sydney later on that year. For David Lewis this participation by his son was as important as his own incredible saga.

  – Chapter 5 –

  The Empty Quarter

  Wildred Thesiger’s travels in Southern Arabia, 1946

  It is not just the thrill of the unknown that has enticed Wilfred Thesiger back to unspoilt, wild country throughout his life; it is a fascination by and love of the people themselves, particularly the Bedu, who live on the edge of the savage Empty Quarter, that desert-within-a-desert in southern Arabia. He loved the harsh emptiness of the slow-moving waves of the sand dunes and the black plains of sun-blasted salt flats, was challenged by the prospect of crossing regions where no white man had been before, not so much for scientific discovery or research but rather for the pure adventure. But having crossed it once, he came back to it again by another route, and then again and again, just to live and travel with the Bedu whose lifestyle he admired and enjoyed so much, finally, he was forced to leave southern Arabia by the rulers and also by their English advisers who feared he might upset an already delicate balance between the nomadic, sometimes warring, tribes.

  Wilfred Thesiger is the archetypal English gentleman adventurer born, perhaps, a hundred years later than ideally he would have liked. In the Victorian era there were so many more unexplored, unspoilt empty spaces; he would have been with Speke and Burton or perhaps, like Sven Hedin, would have wandered across Central Asia. Though in some ways he was born into the way of life that he eventually pursued. Son of the British Minister to Abyssinia, his infancy and early childhood were spent in that wild and colourful upland country (now Ethiopia), the only one to retain complete independence in the face of colonial domination by the great European powers. He had vivid memories of plumed warriors, rich barbaric pomp, ragged mountains and deep gorges.

  Through Eton and Oxford he dreamt of African adventures. His opportunity came in 1930, when he was invited, as his father’s eldest son, to attend Haile Selassie’s coronation as Emperor of Ethiopia. Then, as soon as the coronation was over, he took off to the wild and lawless Danakil country to the south of Addis Ababa.

  ‘I had everything I wanted, even more than I had dreamt of as a boy poring over Jock of the Bushveld. Here were herds of oryx and Soemering’s gazelle on the plains, waterbuck in the tamarisk along the river, lesser kudu and gerenuk in the thick bush and greater kudu, trophy of trophies, among the isolated mountains. Here were the camp fires and voices of the night, the voices of my Somalis, the brilliant African stars, the moonlight on the river, the chill wind of the dawn, the hot still noons, mirages transforming the parched plains into phantom lakes, dust devils spiralling through the bush, vultures circling over the camp, guinea fowl calling among the trees and the loading and unloading of the camels.’

  There was risk as well. The Danakil tribesmen, who gathered round their campsite at night to view the white stranger with his valuable weapons and other gear, all wore large curved daggers from which hung leather thongs, one for each man they had killed and castrated. On the first trip he reached the edge only of the Danakil desert, but it was on this little expedition that his love of adventure and the open desert spaces was formed.

  On his return to Oxford he spent much of his time dreaming of the Danakil and planning another expedition, once he had graduated. In 1933 he set out with a friend hoping to follow the river Awash, which flows into the Danakil desert but then vanishes, never reaching the sea. Three expeditions had ventured into this region at the end of the nineteenth century, but they had all disappeared without trace, presumably murdered by the Danakil tribesmen. Nesbitt, an English venturer, had managed to cross the desert from south to north in 1928, but his party also had been attacked and three of their retainers killed.

  Thesiger’s companion was forced to drop out at an early stage in the expedition, but this in no way deterred Thesiger:

  ‘I was glad to see him go for, though we never quarrelled, I found his presence an irritant, and was happy now to be on my own. This was no fault of his, for he was good natured and accommodating. Like many English travellers, I find it difficult to live for long periods with my own kind. On later journeys I was to find comradeship among Arabs and Africans, the very difference between us binding me closely to them.’

  This was to be the pattern of nearly all his future ventures; it was what gave him such a close understanding of the people among whom he lived. I have often been conscious of the barrier that we mountaineers inevitably erect between ourselves and the mountain people whose country we pass through, simply by being an expedition and carrying our own customs and interdependence within our own tiny, inlooking world, through Himalayan or Andean foothills.

  Later, Thesiger realised that on that first trip to the Danakil, where he had penetrated country from which no European had ever returned alive, ‘I still had a sense of racial superiority, acquired in my childhood, which set me apart from the men who followed me. Even Omar, my Somali headman, on whom I was utterly dependent, was in no sense a companion.’

  But this attitude was to change. After completing his journey down the Awash river, he made a leisurely return to Britain and the problems of following a career. He joined the Sudan Political Service, managed to get himself posted to the most isolated and undeveloped district in the Sudan, and settled down to the life of the dedicated outback colonial civil servant, using his periods of leave not to rush to the fleshpots of Europe, but to make long desert journeys into the Sahara. With the war came more ventures; involvement in the liberation of Ethiopia, frustration at the inevitable wastage and bureaucracy that accompanies the massive war machine and then a period in the Long Range Desert Group. At first glance, this seemed immensely adventurous and very risky as they operated
in jeeps far behind the German lines, shooting up convoys, raiding supply dumps, but Thesiger found it strangely unsatisfying. ‘We carried food, water and fuel with us; we required nothing from our surroundings. I was in the desert, but insulated from it by the jeep in which I travelled.’

  It was in the aftermath of war, by chance, as so often happens, that the opportunity arose which was to lead him to the Empty Quarter of Arabia and a way of life he has pursued ever since. He was in Addis Ababa, just having resigned from the post of political adviser to the Ethiopian Government, when he met O.B. Lean, a desert locust specialist. Lean wanted someone to venture into the Empty Quarter to look for locust outbreak centres. Thesiger knew nothing of entomology, but was immediately attracted by the venture and accepted on the spot.

  Thesiger arrived in Dhofar on the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula in October 1945. Already he spoke Arabic and was accustomed to desert travel. He also knew what he wanted to do – to explore the Empty Quarter which had been penetrated by only two Europeans, Bertram Thomas in 1930–1931 when he had made a crossing from south to north, and by H. St John Philby who, in 1932, had ventured into its centre from the north and had escaped from it to the north-west. Thesiger was attracted to the ways of the desert Arab and sought to become one of them. But the barriers confronting him were formidable. In 1945 southern Arabia was still comparatively undeveloped; oilfields clung to the coast of the Persian Gulf while the desert tribes lived as they had always done, herding their goats and camels from one oasis to the next, warring and feuding with each other. Theirs was among the hardest livings in the world, comparable with that of the bushmen of the Kalahari, the aboriginals of the Australian desert, or the Eskimos.