‘If we cut up the boots,’ Mike said, looking at me from beneath a fringe of iced-up eyebrow, ‘it will mean the end of the expedition: failure.’
I nodded. We carried no spares. To save weight every item not vital to progress had been jettisoned: and that meant none of those spares normally considered indispensable, such as extra mitts, goggles or bootlaces. We had a choice between dangerously delaying the resuscitation of my feet while thawing the laces out and cutting through the obstacles at once to give my feet a better chance but the expedition none. Ruefully I remembered a day eight years before when I had fallen through Arctic ice and Ollie Shepard had saved my feet by cutting my boots off with the help of an axe.
Reluctantly, I asked Mike, by now shivering with cold himself, to thaw the boots out as quickly as possible. I could feel no sensation at all in either foot. The thawing process seemed to take for ever. Once the boots were off, Mike declared my left foot ‘redeemable’ since it had remained miraculously dry, except for the toes and the sole.
‘Not so good,’ he said, shaking his head as he examined my other foot. Three of the toes and an adjoining area of skin were parchment-white and devoid of any feeling. Slowly he warmed up both my feet, expending valuable fuel, before applying dry dressings. Breaking the normal rule against using the cooker merely for damp clothes, he dried out my socks and slipped them over the bandages.
Next day we set out on time. I felt no pain throughout the day and was surprised when, back in the tent, Mike swore aloud on removing the dressing. What appeared to be the outer half of my little toe and a segment of flesh had come away with the bandage. A large area of raw flesh and bone was left exposed which felt, as soon as my foot warmed up and blood returned to the nerve ends, as though it were on fire. For the rest of the journey I dreaded the mornings until, after an hour or so of travel, the foot grew cold enough to deaden the nerves. Likewise the evenings, when the reverse process took place. Nevertheless, despite our heavy loads and my early morning limp, our progress continued to outpace that of the two fully air-supported expeditions to our north. After fifteen days we passed the ninety-eight nautical miles point, the existing unsupported world record, and celebrated with an extra cup of tea.
In bad conditions we craved each tea break, yet at the same time feared the intense cold that accompanied a halt. One evening Mike announced that he had broken one of our two vacuum flasks. Since this cut us down to a single intake of hot liquid a day, I felt distinctly hostile towards him, although I made no comment.
‘We have a choice from now on,’ Mike said. ‘We can use the remaining flask either for tea or for Pre-stress.’
Pre-stress was a specially prepared quick-energy drink that helped to stave off hypothermia and which we normally alternated with tea.
‘As a doctor, what do you advise?’ I asked Mike.
‘We’d better stick to Pre-stress, despite the taste,’ he said, giving the reply I had expected.
Two days later Mike was unusually quiet in the tent and after a while broke the news that he had somehow managed to break the second and last vacuum flask. Mike’s solution to the problem was that we should use our communal plastic pee-bottle.
‘You must be joking,’ I replied. ‘Are you suggesting peeing into it each night and drinking Pre-stress out of it each day?’
‘Why not? We can call it Pee-stress. Urine will do you no harm, after all.’
‘Mine won’t,’ I retorted. ‘But I can’t say I fancy the idea of drinking from a container with your frozen pee stuck to the outside.’
‘I never thought of you as fastidious. But I’m happy if you don’t wish to share the contents.’
‘It’s one short step from cannibalism,’ I muttered. But the following day I noticed no change in the taste of the Pre-stress.
Some days later the tent was filled with a foul smell when Mike changed my foot bandages. Gangrene. It spelt the end of our attempt for 1986. We found 400 yards of comparative flat surface on a well-weathered floe and marked out an airstrip with coloured ration bags. Then I radioed Flo Howell at Ward Hunt Island. We had passed the record of the previous best unsupported northing by nine miles but we were still over 300 miles from the Pole.
Back home I learned I was to be installed in the Guinness Book of Records’ World Hall of Fame as the ‘World’s Greatest Living Explorer’ (alongside Paul McCartney for music and Billie Jean King for sport). I hobbled on to the BBC stage to receive my award from David Frost and Norris McWhirter wearing a black sock over the bandages and no shoes. Ginny and I gained more quiet satisfaction from receiving the Polar Medal from the Queen, with unique bars for Antarctica and the Arctic. Ginny was the first woman to receive the medal, and soon afterwards the first woman to become a member of the prestigious Antarctic Club.
Ollie, Mike and I had another try for the Pole in early 1988. Flo Howell was again base leader, this time with his wife Morag manning the radio with her colourful Orcadian accent. This attempt foundered after sixty miles in the face of appalling terrain and weather. The following spring Mike Stroud and I set off yet again from Ward Hunt Island. The conditions were average but we fell well short of the record we had set in 1986 and I opened up a skin graft on my right foot which had been applied after the gangrene episode. As we left Ward Hunt Island for the last time I asked Mike if he would like to try once more, next time from the Siberian side of the Pole.
‘Glasnost permitting,’ he replied with a grin.
The thawing of relations with Russia had indeed opened the field and in 1990 there were, as well as ourselves, Russians, Canadians and Norwegians all preparing to be the first to make it unaided to the Pole. Although the North Pole is some 100 miles further from Russia than from Canada, the sea currents carry the ice floes towards not away from the Pole which should, we all thought, prove a great help. In Moscow I was delighted that Arctic hero, Dr Dmitry Shparo, was prepared to organise my bid. He warned me of stiff competition from Colonel Vladimir Chukov of the Soviet Special Forces. On the other side of the world the Canadians were led by none other than my old friend Jack McConnell.
From Moscow in the spring of 1990 Mike, Flo, Morag and I were flown to the depths of Siberia and stayed one night in a scientific camp where only a year earlier we would never have been allowed, for the station was the Soviet equivalent of Canada’s Defence Early Warning line which Charlie and I had encountered on our 1981 push to Alert. Our Soviet hosts entertained us to dinner at the even remoter station of Golomiany where we were told proudly that we were the first foreigners to visit since the days of the Tsar. One of the six-person station’s occupants had been killed the previous month by a polar bear outside their cookhouse. Once the sun arrived along the Siberian coast, Dmitry organised an ex-Afghan gun-ship to fly us north to Cape Arktikiski, the most northern point of land in Severnaya Zemlya. As on our previous Arctic journeys, Terry Lloyd of ITN was on hand to see us off.
On the other side of the world three Norwegian ski champions had declared their intention to reach the Pole first and two separate teams of Soviet skiers were somewhere behind us. Flo and Morag Howell manned our radio base, together with two Russian operators, and through the electronic clutter of our HF radio Morag’s voice came and went from a Soviet Army shack on the island of Sredniy, keeping us up to date with the competition as we made our own careful progress north.
‘Kagge and his Norwegians are out of the race,’ she told us some weeks later. ‘One of them has been airlifted to safety with a frostbitten foot. The other two are carrying on but their challenge has obviously been compromised by their air contact.’
Now we had only the Russians to worry about, for Jack McConnell’s Canadian team had also withdrawn with frostbite.
‘Chukov’s men are doing well. We estimate they are less than one hundred miles to the south of you.’
‘What about Fyodor Konyukhov?’ I asked Morag.
‘Also compromised,’ Morag replied. ‘A Soviet helicopter picked him up. He was in trouble with breakin
g ice in a bear-infested zone.’
I knew that Vladimir Chukov was ranked high in the lists of Russian polar explorers. He had led two unsupported journeys to the Pole in previous years. Both times he had reached the Pole but death and injury to team members on each occasion had necessitated air contact. Chukov played by the unwritten rules of unsupported polar travel. These stipulated that any contact at all en route to the Pole compromised the attempt. So Chukov was trying again. He had learned many lessons. He knew the hazardous nature of the drifting Russian pack-ice, far looser and more volatile than the corresponding sea-ice on the Canadian side. Here, a single error could quickly lead to death. I knew his team’s progress would be slow and methodical.
After about 400 miles Mike and I abandoned our heavy carbon-fibre sledge-boats and continued with basic food, fuel and camp gear carried in rucksacks. These weighed nigh on 100 pounds each and it was all but impossible to stand up unaided after struggling into the harness. Our chances of making the last two degrees of latitude, 120 miles, to the Pole rested on luck and avoidance of hypothermia. Sometimes I skied, sometimes I strapped my skis to the pack and walked. Mike had no option but to walk as one of his ski bindings had broken irreparably only seven days out. This slowed us to the speed of a walking expedition but that we kept going at all was a tribute to Mike’s tenacity.
One day on a drifting hummock I spotted the fresh prints of an adult polar bear. I knew I must warn Mike, for bears will usually attack the rear member of any group and we had heard that the Norwegians had had to shoot a large male bear close by their tent. I regretted the fact that only a few days previously we had abandoned our radio and our revolver as being too heavy to keep carrying. I tried to bury negative thoughts but the total concentration necessary for successful navigation in broken pack-ice was absent that morning which was perhaps why I misjudged the width of a canal through the porridge-like slush and fell in. Fettered by my skis and rolled face-down by my heavy rucksack, I struggled in panic until Mike arrived and, lying on his stomach, reached down into the canal. He managed to grasp a loose strap from my sack and, with no means of leverage and with fingers already lacerated from broken blisters, he hauled me to safety through sheer force of willpower.
Over the following weeks we each fell in six or seven times, mercifully not both at the same time. Around 88° North, with 447 miles behind us and within a tantalising eighty-nine miles of the Pole, our strength quite suddenly disappeared as the extreme loss of bodyweight reached the point where we became debilitated. Cold pervaded our bodies and sleep, always difficult on ice that shrieks and shudders, grew impossible lying on thinly padded bones. In addition my eyesight became too poor to navigate. To pull a heavy sledge you must lean forward. Your heavy breathing if wearing a balaclava and goggles will mist up the goggles when below –40°C. So, as navigator, needing constantly to scrutinise the ice ahead, you travel with no goggles, squinting into the glare. Not good for your long-term sight. Though we were only ten days from the Pole we recognised it was time to give up and activated a miniature radio beacon to request our evacuation.
A Soviet helicopter extricated us and took us to their nearest scientific base on an ice-floe. This unfortunately split up in a storm, cutting their landing zone in half, so the Aeroflot plane which commuted scientists weekly to and from the Soviet Union was delayed by ten days awaiting the bulldozing of a new runway. While we waited I experienced a severe kidney stone attack, my third in twenty years, and Mike dosed me with his remaining store of pain-killers. When we eventually returned to Moscow we learned that Chukov’s group had also failed to reach the Pole and had been evacuated further south than us. We were given medals and assured by the Russians that we had made the longest and fastest unsupported journey towards the Pole to date. Polar records are seldom without controversy. The Norwegians, Erling Kagge and Børge Ousland, did reach the Pole that season but only after the third member of their party had been airlifted out, so their claim to be wholly unsupported was not recognised by the Russians, the Canadians or the British. To us it was as blatant a piece of assistance as an Olympic athlete taking drugs. I said so in the press. The Norwegians called me a bad sportsman and we left it at that. In 1994 Ousland was at last to achieve a proper record when he made it solo and unsupported to the Pole in fifty-two days.
After the last of these Arctic journeys I went to London’s top eye surgeon, Eric Arnott, worried about double vision. He diagnosed that the long weeks of travel with no horizon and no real focus point had made my eyes focus at a distance of one metre ahead of my boots and it took weeks for this ‘convergence of the visual axes’ to relax.
‘You failed again, then?’ Dr Hammer growled when I first met him after the Siberian journey.
‘Not exactly, Doctor,’ I bridled. ‘We broke the existing world record by over 300 miles.’
A few months after our group finally abandoned our North Pole attempts, Charlie Burton and Ollie Shepard began to come down with South Pole fever. How about us making an unassisted crossing of Antarctica, they suggested, manhauling sledges just like Scott. It sounded good, but I already had other expedition plans under way at the time, so I listened to them cajoling me persuasively but in vain in the map room of the Royal Geographical Society. Polarhullar notwithstanding, I had had enough of frozen climes for a while.
9
The Frankincense Trail
Back in 1968, when I was serving in Dhofar, a bedu guide had told me about a fabulously wealthy city of antiquity which was reputed to be lost in the sands. Over the years, on occasional return visits for other purposes, I had investigated possible sites of this lost city but never with enough time to take things to a conclusion. Now Ginny and I had taken on the planning and mounting of a fully fledged expedition. Some historical sources called the city Ubar, others Irem. My hunch was that the site must be somewhere astride the trade route which carried the precious high-quality Dhofari frankincense to the markets of the north.
On the first maps of the Arabian Peninsula, drawn up by Ptolemy in AD 150, there was a major market town which he located on the southern rim of the region now known as the Empty Quarter, the greatest sand desert of the world. Lawrence of Arabia records being told of ruined castles seen by wandering tribes. Bertram Sidney Thomas, an administrator of Palestine, and financial advisor to the then Sultan of Muscat, received permission in 1925 to attempt a crossing of the Empty Quarter from south to north. The journey took him fifty-eight days. He received the personal congratulations of King George V and the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, but the mystery of Ubar remained unsolved.
Our own interest evolved into a joint venture with an old friend, Nick Clapp from Los Angeles, who had edited Dr Hammer’s film of the Transglobe expedition. I would liaise with Sultan Qaboos of Oman, organise sponsors and lead the expedition in the field, Nick would do the archaeological research and the filming. His researches led him to NASA in quest of space photographs, hoping these would give us a head start, but all the eventual NASA shuttle photos produced was an L-shaped site way out in the dunes. All the same, the connection between buried biblical cities and space-age technology remained a good talking point for raising sponsorship.
We began with a short reconnaissance trip in July 1990, taking along with us an eminent archaeologist from Missouri called Juris Zarins who had a vaguely reassuring resemblance to Indiana Jones, complete with battered brown trilby. Juris didn’t think we had a cat in hell’s chance of finding Ubar, if indeed it existed, but he was keen to have a chance to conduct archaeological work in southern Oman and if searching for Ubar provided a pretext, fair enough. Our timing coincided with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, but as nobody was expecting the trouble to spread to Dhofar, our visas were duly stamped. Our main guide on the ground would be Major Trevor Henry, my instructor on an SAS jungle course back in the 1970s. He told me bluntly that if there had been any surface ruins in Dhofar they would have been spotted by oil prospectors, talkative bedu or land and a
ir patrols from the Sultan’s Armed Forces. But he was happy to help.
First of all we flew by helicopter to inspect the mysterious NASA-provided L-site. On the ground it was as clear as it had been from 160 miles in space, but Juris was quick to dismiss it as merely an ancient lake bed, though he did find the stone patterns of some ancient dwellings and hearths nearby. We then flew to other possible locations that might have a bearing on the frankincense trade. I revisited caves from which I had once spent many days and nights ambushing Marxist soldiers.
Trevor pointed out the spoor of leopards and some aloe trees – ‘very good for curing wounds’ – and castor-oil trees – ‘you know what that’s good for’. He led us to Jebel Kasbah, a lofty crag above a spring. Hidden by thorn and mimosa, a tangle of ruined walls puzzled Juris. A large rectangular room, well plastered and hardly damaged over the centuries, had perhaps served as a reservoir for monsoon water. It was reasonable to deduce this was a mountain garrison from which the incense trade was once policed, an interesting fragment in our jigsaw puzzle, but not a clue to Ubar’s whereabouts.
After a whirlwind tour of the plain, the mountains and the Nejd, we drove from Thamrait to my earlier Ubar hunting grounds of Shis’r and Fasad on the edge of the Sands. Both places had undergone considerable change. Where in 1968 there was only barren desert at Shis’r and a crumbling Beau Geste mud fort, there now flourished cultivated plots of palm, fruit and vegetables. At Shis’r there was also a modern Arab-style housing development not far from the rock cleft waterhole.
Shis’r’s very location, so close to the Sands and astride the best aquifer in the region, indicated that ancient camel trains may have watered here en route for Yemen and previous visitors had recorded tracks running west from here to the Sands which our satellite photographs had confirmed. We spent three hours wandering about a heap of rubble and Juris was delighted to find fragments of pottery and various ambiguous mounds, evidence of former springs. He was sure people had lived here longer ago than the 300 years theorised by the only previous archaeologist to have visited Shis’r. There was plenty for Juris to explore, but as to locating Ubar, we were really no further forward. The interim report I eventually submitted to the Sultan and our sponsors made the best of a bad job.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 15