Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  On 2 July, after a game attempt, the ship was forced back some 150 miles south of our floe. On 10 July the mist cleared at noon long enough for a sun shot. After seventy days on the floe we were at 82° North. That night a chunk of two acres split off our floe. The next-door floe rode up over a forty-yard front and 80 per cent of our pan was covered in slush or water up to seven feet deep. New ridgewalls rose up daily and noisily where we struck our neighbours. Off our seaside edges humpback whales sang at night and huge regattas of ice sailed by before the wind. There was seldom any sign of the sun and the low-hung sky reflected the dark blotches of great expanses of open sea to the south and north of our floating raft.

  As we approached nearer to Fram Strait we began to gyrate like scum heading for a drain. To remind us that summer here was short, the surface of our melt-pools began to freeze over.

  The Benjamin Bowring tried a second time to reach us in mid-July and again they failed, this time putting themselves in considerable danger. Anton recorded: ‘hurling the ship at six- to seven-feet thick floes which are breaking without too much difficulty. But the ice is more solid and further to the south than before . . . Evening: We are stuck solid at 82°07′ north, 01°20′ east, 82 miles south of Ran . . . Jimmy has spotted a cracked weld.’

  Cleverly the skipper rammed a low floe and managed to lift the damaged bows clear of the sea. Two engineers worked, squatting on the ice, to effect temporary repairs with welding gear.

  During the last week of July our floe was daily buffeted and diminished in size. Charlie had chosen our camp spot with great skill, as it was about the only part of the floe still uncracked. But on 29 July he showed me a widening seam close beside his tent. We had been on the floe ninety-five days and our entry into the crushing zone was imminent.

  I told Ginny and she spoke to the skipper. They decided to make a final dedicated push northwards. Karl flew Ginny from Greenland to Longyearbyen where she boarded the Benjamin Bowring. They set out on the first day of August, our seventh month out on the pack ice, and – within twelve hours of smashing a straight route through medium pack – they reached a point forty-nine miles to our south.

  Late on 2 August after a twenty-four-hour fight north-west through heavy ice and thick fog, the skipper reported sinister signs of a wind change. The pack would close about the ship if the wind rose. Throughout the long night the skipper and crew willed the ship north yard by yard in a potentially suicidal bid to reach us.

  At 9.00 a.m. on 3 August Ginny spoke on my radio. She sounded tired but excited. ‘We are seventeen miles south of your last reported position and jammed solid.’

  Charlie and I packed basic survival gear into our two canoes. We had hoped the Benjamin Bowring would smash her way to our floe, but this was clearly impossible. For us to attempt to travel from our floe might easily prove disastrous, for everything was in motion about us: great floating blocks colliding in the open channels and wide skeins of porridge-ice marauding the sea lanes. At noon I took a sun shot which put us only twelve miles from the ship. A southerly wind or current could easily widen this gap. We left our bedraggled tents and I took a bearing south-east to the probable current position of the Benjamin Bowring. The wind blew at twelve knots as we paddled nervously through the first open lead.

  Having lain in our bags with scant exercise for so long, we were unfit. Charlie was nearly sick with the sudden effort. Every so often I filled my water bottle from a melt pool and we both drank deep.

  Makeshift skids attached to the canoes snapped off on rough ice and then we dragged the boats along on their thin metal hulls.

  Trying to negotiate a spinning mass of ice-islands in a wide lake, I glanced back and saw two high bergs crunch together with an impact that sent a surge of water towards my canoe. Luckily Charlie had not yet entered the moving corridor and so avoided being crushed.

  At 7.00 p.m., climbing a low ridge to scout ahead, I saw an imperfection on the horizon along the line of my bearing. I blinked and it was gone. Then I saw it again – the distant masts of the Benjamin Bowring.

  I cannot describe the feeling of that moment, the most wonderful of my life. I jumped high in the air, yelling at Charlie. He was out of earshot but I waved like a madman and he must have guessed.

  For three years I had always known our chances of overall success were heavily loaded against us. I had never dared allow myself to hope. But now I knew and I felt the strength of ten men. I knelt down on the ice and thanked God.

  For three hours we heaved and paddled. Sometimes we lost sight of the masts, but when they re-appeared they were always a little bigger.

  At fourteen minutes past midnight on 4 August at 80°31′ North, 00°59′ West, all but astride the Greenwich Meridian, we climbed on board the Benjamin Bowring.

  Ginny was standing alone by a cargo hatch. We hugged each other as though we would never let go. Her eyes were full of tears, but she was smiling. Between us we had spent twenty years of our lives to reach this point, the fulfilment of her dream.

  Revelry lasted well into the night. There was no hurry now, which was just as well because the ship remained stuck fast for twelve days, until the wind changed.

  From the lonely islands of Spitsbergen we steamed south through the Greenland Sea and the North Sea. On 29 August Prince Charles joined us on the Thames and brought the ship back to our starting-point at Greenwich, almost three years to the day since we had set out. Ten thousand cheering people lined the banks. Our polar circle around the world was complete.

  That night, when all the crew and our friends had gone, Ginny and I slept in our old cabin. I watched as she fell asleep and the lines of stress fell away from her face. I felt as happy as I had ever been.

  8

  Hammer and Sickle

  Three days after returning home I learned that Transglobe had accumulated debts totalling £106,000. We had no funds to pay them off. This was where Anton Bowring appeared in our hour of need to announce that he considered the expedition complete only when all debts were paid. For the next eighteen months he and Ginny worked full-time to that end, a thankless task, but they eventually even turned a modest profit through sales of T-shirts and old Transglobe gear at Camden Lock street market. Anton and his wife Jill, the Benjamin Bowring’s cook for three years, became our best friends. Ginny was godmother to their eldest daughter, Mini Ginny, who was conceived during Transglobe. They were to have three daughters, all red-haired like Jill, and collectively known as the Carrots. I meanwhile was writing the expedition book, To the Ends of the Earth, which made the Sunday Times bestseller list. Bothie achieved fame by nipping TV host Russell Harty and I was decoyed into This Is Your Life. Family and friends assembled from all periods of my past, included Chris Cazenove and Jack McConnell, as well as the history mistress who caught me on Ginny’s school roof in Eastbourne and the entire Transglobe team. Eamonn Andrews’ researchers were put off the military aspects of my life when one asked my former CO in Oman whether he could regurgitate any heart-warming tale of my ‘bravely saving someone’s life’. The colonel replied with vehemence. ‘Saving lives?! Fiennes wasn’t out there to save lives. He was there to kill Communists.’ Not what we would today describe as PC.

  I turned forty in March 1983 and one of my presents was a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words ‘I’m over the hill’. But I was discovering what happens to so many polar travellers, the urge to return. As the less comfortable memories of the Transglobe years receded, I increasingly felt the lure of the North. I determined to ignore this mesmeric polar attaction with the same vehemence as a smoker must shun thoughts of tobacco. For a while I was helped by a phone call from Los Angeles at 2.00 a.m.

  ‘Is that Ran Fiennes?’ The voice was gravelly and brusque. ‘This is Armand Hammer.’

  Assured that it was me, the good Dr Hammer continued, ‘I want you to work for me in London. You will be my Vice-President of Public Relations in Europe.’

  This was my very first offer of a civilian job. The octogenarian head of
Occidental Petroleum knew me because, at Prince Charles’s behest, he had financed the film-making on the Transglobe expedition and approved of our success. So, aged forty, I experienced the joys of commuting for the first time. I discovered that ‘nine to five’ actually meant ‘seven to seven’. I made after-dinner speeches in French and German on behalf of Dr Hammer at glittering European functions. I tried hard to sell an unwanted oil terminal for him on Canvey Island and saw that his visits to Europe ran without a hitch, despite his penchant for changing his mind and schedule with little warning and requiring a meeting at two days’ notice with Prince Charles or Robert Maxwell or Mrs Thatcher. In the same week he had me rushing to Rome with secret papers for the ex-King of Afghanistan (who Dr Hammer was hoping to reinstate) and making a speech to Raisa Gorbachev in Moscow. I learned to chat up airport officials to allow me to meet the doctor’s private Boeing 727 with a bevy of rented Rolls-Royces on the airstrip to avoid the tiresome business of customs and immigration. This worked everywhere in the world, including Moscow, Peking and Cardiff, but not Heathrow, where the rules were inflexible and, when I finally gave up trying to buck their system, I felt quite proud to be British!

  Amid all this Hammer-inspired rushing about, Oliver Shepard called me one day in 1985 with a proposal for the ultimate polar journey, the grail of the international polar fraternity: to reach the North Pole with no outside support and no air contact. No one had yet achieved it. I found myself reacting with unexpected enthusiasm and realised that, ever since the end of the Transglobe travels, I had without knowing it been yearning to return to the cold white unknown. There is a Danish word, polarhullar, an ache for the polar regions, that grips the soul of a traveller so that nowhere else will ever again satisfy his or her appetite for the essence of ‘over there and beyond’. A victim of polarhullar will forever be drawn back to the very extremities of earth.

  Part of my annually renewed contract with Dr Hammer allowed me to go off on expeditions for three months in any year. After the success of Transglobe, sponsorship had become much easier to obtain. Equipment, food, travel and insurance could all be quickly lined up free of charge in return for promises of publicity. To obtain the interest of a major newspaper or television film producer was, however, still no easy business.

  I failed to find a documentary film-maker but, since such films are statistically watched only by a maximum of two million TV viewers, I concentrated on the main TV News channels which were watched twice daily by over sixteen million. I had once worked as a TV News reporter for ITN in Oman and so approached them first. This began a great working relationship with their reporter Terry Lloyd who ITN agreed to send north with us that year to the base we would make on Ward Hunt Island in the Canadian Arctic.

  In the winter of 1985 Ginny was due to lecture about her Very Low Frequency work in Antarctica to a conference in Chicago. At little extra cost she flew on to Resolute Bay in the North West Territories and hitched a lift on to Ward Hunt Island, a remote former scientific summer camp, in a Twin Otter ski-plane that was positioning sonar buoys in the Arctic pack. Ginny measured the skeletal ribs of one of the long abandoned Ward Hunt huts and a sponsor back home constructed a tough new custom-made hut cover. But after reconnoitring the place for us, Ginny would sadly no longer be our base leader.

  Back in England, and thanks to my salary from Dr Hammer, we had found our dream home, a near derelict farm in the wilds of Exmoor. There was no electricity but Ginny had started to build up an organic beef herd around an initial six Aberdeen Angus cows. She was also breeding from Bothie’s girlfriend Blackdog, the stray Inuit puppy who had come back with us from Tuktoyaktuk and who Ginny had mated to a Crufts champion black labrador. In 1985 Ginny recommended one of our Transglobe team, Laurence Howell, known as Flo, to take her place in the Arctic as our base leader and radio operator.

  Ollie and I completed our winter sledge trial runs and in March 1986 were established at our Ward Hunt base with Flo, preparing to set off. A few days later a Twin Otter brought in the French manhauler, Dr Jean-Louis Etienne. He was aiming to be the first solo traveller to the North Pole. We agreed to show him the best route we had discovered through the chaotic pack-ice that formed a high wall just north of the Ward Hunt ice-shelf. Then we shook hands with the diminutive doctor and watched him disappear into the moonlit icescape.

  ‘I wish we had sledges like his,’ Ollie commented. The French sledge weighed a mere four pounds and its load eight. Our own 450-pound loads included seventy pounds of bare sledge. Jean-Louis would be resupplied by air every eighth day and his sledge replaced whenever it was damaged so he could afford to travel light. But if we were to be unassisted this could never be for us. We were finding that even the superior design of our new sledges did little to improve our snail-like performance. We kept paring down equipment to a bare minimum, even shaving the Teflon runners with Stanley knives.

  At this moment Ollie had the rug pulled out from under him. He received an ultimatum by radio. Either he returned to London within four weeks or he lost his job, then with Beefeater Gin. He had no alternative but to cry off. This left Ginny back home in England with the task of finding a last-minute replacement from the very small field of fully fit polar sledgers. Polar expert Roger Mear suggested that Ginny call Dr Mike Stroud from Guy’s Hospital who had been first reserve for Mear’s own and very recent Antarctic journey. He would still be manhaul-fit.

  When, a week later, Mike climbed off the Twin Otter at Ward Hunt Island I was shocked at how short he was. Small people, in my book, were not built to drag over 300-pound sledges for hours on end. You needed carthorses. Mike’s head came to a level with my shoulder. But, on closer inspection, it became clear that Mike was built like an ox, with the biceps, chest and thighs of a bodybuilder. He pulled like a husky, digging his boots in and leaning so far forward that his nose seemed to scrape the ice. I was soon to discover he could drag his sledge, more than twice his bodyweight, alongside mine and trudge on relentlessly for hour after hour. So we waved goodbye to Flo Howell and set out north three days after Mike’s arrival. I reflected that if a committee had been running this expedition, after the fashion of our Transglobe committee, we would never have resolved things so quickly. I remembered reading that ‘a committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but as a group decide nothing can be done.’

  At the time Mike Stroud arrived on Ward Hunt Island the world record for human travel without support towards the North Pole stood at ninety-eight nautical miles following the near fatal journey of the Simpsons and Roger Tufft in 1968. Subsequent attempts, such as those of David Hempleman-Adams and Clive Johnson in the 1980s, had ended in failure and frostbite less than fifty miles from the Arctic coast. The terrain included some 2,000 walls of ice rubble up to twenty-five feet high, regions of rotten ice that break up and overturn as you try to negotiate them and zones of open waters, sometimes as far as the eye can see, which are often skimmed with a treacherous shuga ice layer of porridge-like consistency. Add to these obstacles a temperature that is often lower than a deep-freeze and a northerly wind that cuts into exposed skin like a bayonet and it is no wonder that, despite intense international competition, the challenge had yet to be met.

  Some seventy miles from the coastline we were struggling in a field of broken ice-blocks and thin floes. My sledge cannoned off a twelve-foot chunk and knocked me from my hauling position. I broke through the ice and was instantly immersed. Mike was luckily close at hand and dragged me out, but the damage was done, for we could not stop in such a fractured zone. So it was four unpleasant hours later before Mike could erect the tent. By that time my hands were lumps without feeling and I could not help him. More seriously, I had no feeling in my feet. Inside the tent I struggled to remove my sledge jacket, but since both it and my clumsy mitts were encased in a thick film of frozen sea-ice, I had no success. All the while I battered my two boots together in an attempt to force blood to flow.

  Mike at last appeared through the tent’s tu
nnel entrance with some four inches of frozen nose mucous stuck to the chin of his balaclava like a gnome’s beard. Unlashing the sledge had quickly made him cold. Any pause from the exhausting action of man-hauling soon results in a lowered heart rate, so that the blood flow rapidly retreats from the extremities and shivering begins. Sweat caught between layers of clothing turns to ice and there is an urgent need to do one of two things: you can either return to the treadmill of manhauling or, if too tired, erect the tent and eat into the sternly rationed daily quota of fuel to provide life-giving heat.

  To cut down cargo weight, our fuel ration allowed only for cooking, not for tent heating or clothes drying, so an immersion like mine caused major problems with the vital fuel supply. This sort of setback could lead to bitterness between team members, since to fall in could be considered the result of stupidity. On all previous expeditions I had gone to considerable lengths to vet every team member but circumstance had obliged me to accept Mike sight unseen. That we proved to be totally compatible was remarkably lucky. There was no strained atmosphere, no recrimination, not even the occasional heated exchange.

  Mike managed to remove my mitts and I shoved my hands inside the ski jacket and under my armpits. There was a chance they might return to life, according to Mike’s practised eye. More seriously, my boots would not come off, however hard Mike struggled with them. The obvious answer, since it was vital we extricated my toes with minimal delay, would have been to cut through the frozen bootlaces with our pin-nosed pliers. Since the laces were completely encrusted, the actual boot canvas would need cutting too.