by Bear Grylls
Exploration, I have discovered, is all about taking that one extra step. When you’re nearing the pinnacle of a high-altitude mountain, breathing wildly, with your physical reserves run dry, and are reduced to crawling on your knees, it is heart that matters. It is heart that tips the balance between dragging yourself one step nearer to the summit, and turning back for the safety of camp. And it is in these critical moments and decisions that people distinguish themselves.
I don’t think any of our team felt particularly distinguished or individually brilliant, me included; we were a group of well-trained and hungry young guys, but we had a bond, something special that held us together when it was bleak and cold and frightening. That bond is hard to define, but it’s because of that bond that I explore. It is why I went in the first place, and it is because of that bond that we all came home.
And it is this ‘coming home’ that, in the world of exploration, is all that ever really matters.
2. BUILDING THE BEST
If you want to build a ship, before you give men tools, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The one niggle that I always had was how would I tell one of my crew’s family if something went truly wrong out there? In the middle of the night, 400 miles from any landmass, in driving rain and sleet, you are so vulnerable.
Trying to move around a small, open boat with inflatable tubes that are slippery as hell and freezing is a lottery. But even in the worst conditions things needed to be done. You couldn’t really avoid having to move around the boat. One slip, a careless move, and in giant waves in pitch darkness, at 25 knots, recovery of a man overboard would be near impossible, however hard we tried.
How would I tell his family? What words would justify my pursuit of this dream? No dream is worth a man’s life. And I knew the buck would always stop with me. It kept me awake often.
This expedition was always going to be different. In the past, certainly on Everest, I had been happy to sit in the back row at meetings, to listen to the leader of the expedition and do as he asked. It was also my prerogative, every now and then, to have a grumble like everyone else. I was OK at being one of the crew, a follower. I quite liked it.
Now, suddenly, it was going to be me making those difficult calls, taking the lead. It was a big deal for me and it made me very nervous. I was heading into an infamously dangerous part of the world, and men’s lives would hang on my decisions. Not just any men’s lives, but my friends’ lives.
I did not particularly seek leadership – it just happened. Leadership is a hard thing to learn, but our past experiences have much to tell us. We’ve all known people who have shaped our lives – schoolteachers, instructors – but what makes some of them remembered with affection and others so feared? For me, the people who had shown me real leadership – in fact, more than that, people I would have been prepared to fight alongside and die with, especially from my military days – were the ones who made me feel special, who went out on a limb for me: my patrol sergeant who shared his last capful of water with me after four days in the desert; the man who said I was OK and stood up for me when it counted.
Neil Laughton had been an incredible leader on the Everest expedition, a friend and a man I could depend on, decisive at times when others might easily have hesitated. I thought of him and tried to think how I like to be led. I guessed that was a good place to start. It was simple: I always felt best when I was trusted, when I felt that what I did mattered, when I was responsible for an area of expertise. When the rope, or the oxygen, or the food, or whatever it was, was up to me.
So I wanted each of my team to assume responsibility in his own area and take a real stake in this expedition. I wanted him to make decisions and feel pride in what he was doing. I didn’t want to be one of those leaders who tries to do everything, inevitably makes mistakes and ends up being resented by everyone. I didn’t want it to be about me; I wanted it to be about us, together, doing our best.
When word went out among the maritime community about this project, CVs started to pour in – ten years of experience here, fifteen there, everyone was an expert, and everyone seemed to want a piece of the action. But for me they missed what I felt really counted in a team. I wanted people who weren’t ‘experts’, I wanted people, yes, who were well trained and competent, but above that I wanted people to whom this expedition really mattered. People who would put their everything into it, their heart and soul, their enthusiasm, their reputation if it all went wrong; people who would be there in the bad times as well as the good.
I wanted people I knew and trusted, people who, when they hadn’t slept for days and their hands were so cold and wet that they were wrinkled, blue and shaking, would still summon up from somewhere inside the ability to get on their hands and knees at 3 a.m. during a storm and rummage to find you an energy bar from the sodden food sack. That was the sort of person I wanted.
I was looking for people who were kind before they were brave, honest before they were brilliant. People who occasionally needed reassurance but who, when the chips were down, I felt would find something deep inside them that is special. It’s called heart. I wasn’t interested in people who were never scared – courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the understanding that fear is human and that we all have the ability to overcome it. I was looking for people who wanted the chance to find that something inside – that part that often surprises us, a part that is gut and instinct, and that is better than we often expect.
This is a something that people rarely get the chance to find.
If I was going to take an open, rigid inflatable boat into those inhospitable waters, I was going to make sure that I had people on whom I could rely. In the end, I picked friends.
The first name on the team was Mick Crosthwaite, first and foremost, if I’m honest, because he was my buddy. We had known each other for as long as either of us could remember, from childhood days, all the way through school, the army and then as climbing partners on the Everest expedition.
Over the years Mick has grown to represent a source of solid friendship, sound judgement and real support. His presence always seems so strong; somehow, with him, I never have to look over my shoulder to check, never have to cast a precautionary glance. I just know I can rely on him 100 per cent of the time. And that’s very rare.
By nature Mick is incredibly single-minded. When he’s at work, running the Tiscali network, the pan-European network-marketing arm of the Internet communications company, nothing else gets in his way. Likewise when he is on an expedition, he moves into a different zone and focuses totally on that.
Sure enough, on the day when he was due to fly from London to Canada for the start of our voyage, Mick arrived at Heathrow airport in his business suit, having rushed from some high-powered meeting where he had clinched, to quote him, ‘a massive deal’. To the amazement of several bystanders, he then proceeded to change into his expedition gear right there in the drop-off zone at Terminal Four. His mobile was switched off and stayed off until he was back in Scotland, a 6,000-mile round trip away.
Mick’s demanding work commitments meant he was unable to make as much of a contribution to the planning stages as he knew he should, and on several occasions this irritated me. At one point I told him that if he wanted to be part of this, that had to start now: ‘I am not another of your employees to be curt with, Mick, get out of work mode and realize you need to start giving a little too much rather than a little too little to this expedition. Everyone is busting a gut and all they see is you leaving early or arriving late. It’s not acceptable and you know it.’ The phone went silent, not dead, just silent. He was thinking. ‘Make a choice, Miguel.’
This was an important and difficult conversation, but it changed everything in the run-up. The others needed to know Mick would start putting his heart into what we were doing now, not just on the actual expedition itself. This was different from climbing. The logistics here were more com
plex than for a small team on a mountain and we needed everyone’s energy in the preparation as much as when we would leave. What Mick didn’t do, someone else had to – and it was too early on for people to feel resentment. It was all the more poignant because the others were now working so hard towards the expedition.
‘I’ve got to go now, Mick.’ And I replaced the receiver.
Mick arrived at the next meeting with the biggest file of meteorological data you’ve ever seen. As our weatherman, he was now in. He’d been the first to join me on the team but really the last to become one of us. But that didn’t matter; what was important was that I had my wingman again.
I suppose our friendship was genuinely forged on Everest. We climbed together throughout, but in the final moments of those three months, when fate and weather and health proved decisive in selecting who finally stood on the roof of the world and who didn’t, fate chose me. I was luckier, that was all.
Mick had climbed to within 350 feet of the summit when he ran out of oxygen. Soon he was slumped in the snow at 28,500 feet, dying. I had spoken to him on the radio from down at Camp Two. He calmly told me he reckoned he had ten minutes to live. Then he went quiet on the radio and wouldn’t respond. I was over 5,000 feet below him, powerless to help as my best friend’s life slowly ebbed away. And in my panic all I could think of was how I was ever going to tell his family.
During this time Neil Laughton found him, helped him to stand up, and together they stumbled down the ridge under the south summit. Exhaustion was too much for Mick though and two hours later, delirious, he slipped and fell almost 500 feet. In truth he should have died, but he survived, was rescued and eventually came back down from the mountain. He knew exactly how close he had been to death.
His response to our time on Everest, particularly after I finally reached the summit, underpins my admiration for him. I think it is a credit to him that he has never felt the need to go back to Everest and try again. He just feels lucky to be alive. To risk everything again to try to climb that extra 350 feet is not a risk worth taking. As so many climbers have learned the hard way, our team included, if you play the odds of one in eight climbers not returning alive from Everest’s summit too often, you don’t always win.
Some people say the summit of a mountain is everything. They’re wrong. Staying alive is everything. The press had no interest in the fact that Mick climbed higher than K2. To them he ‘failed’ to reach the top. But to me, we reached the top together, there was no difference.
I once read that a true friend revels in your success when things are going well and is there for you in difficult times. Well, Mick has been exactly that kind of friend for me. And that’s why it mattered so much that he should be with me this time.
The next challenge for both of us was to tell his parents. I thought he should do this himself.
‘Mick, you’re grown up, for God’s sake, don’t be a wet blanket,’ I told him, eager that it should be he who announced the news and faced his mother’s disquiet, not me. ‘And don’t just procrastinate and let them find out through a newspaper. You’re unbelievable. You’re like an ostrich, burying your head in the sand. Well, I tell you, I’m not getting the blame for this one while you walk quietly by smirking.’
Our families had been extremely close and had known each other for as long as I could remember. Mick’s father was my grandfather’s godson and both our mums are called Sally. However, despite all this, I was always a little bit nervous around his mum near expedition times. This had all started when, aged sixteen, Mick and I had announced that we were saving up to do a parachute jump together and we were off the next day. For some reason, this wasn’t Mick’s fault but mine. In the Crosthwaite household it had somehow become accepted wisdom that it was always unreliable Bear who got honest Mick into dangerous situations. They bought into it every time.
The parachute jump, unsuitable girls, the army, Everest – to this day, somehow, it is all my fault.
Nigel Thompson lives not much more than 100 yards away from our barge on the Thames in London. He knew Shara first, and shared a house with her while we were going out. But since then he has become a close of friend of mine as well. We eat far too many Danish pastries together in our local square, laugh lots and talk about Hussein and Mohammed, the local curry-house waiters, on a daily basis. He has the wickedest sense of humour of anyone I know, and a vulnerability that is gorgeous.
What is it that makes some people get along? Well, we laugh at the same things, we laugh easily. I think that’s important. But there’s more to it than that. We’re comfortable together, and that’s a good thing in a friend. Nige is also godfather to our little son, Jesse.
He has always had a passion for sailing and boats, and was a fanatical rower at both school and university. Despite my being a bit suspicious of his worryingly high level of interest in navigational gadgets, his favourite pastime was getting into trouble in little boats – and naturally, as so often happens with the sea, this made us the best of boating buddies.
I have been to more boat shows with Nige than with anyone else, and have talked more with him about RIBs than is healthy. I knew he had never tasted the extreme environments that the expedition would encounter to such a degree before but he had this latent hunger to do more with his life, to be a bit different. His knowledge, his energy, his enthusiasm to be part of this adventure would, I knew, make Nige the most lovely of people to share the dream with.
I will never forget one particular day at the London Boat Show with Nige. We had been wandering around, chatting to as many different RIB builders and designers as possible. I was beginning to flag, but not Nige. He was in full swing.
‘But can the sheer bow still allow sufficient water clearance in a following sea?’ he would ask. And they would be off. Talking terms I could hardly understand. I needed some air.
‘Nige, let’s come back here later maybe?’ I suggested.
He reluctantly agreed; the boat-builder reached out to shake his hand and passed him his business card.
‘If I can ever help in any way, any advice, whatever it is, just let me know. If you are really going to do this expedition, you need the best RIB ever built. Just give me a call.’
Nige thanked him. There was a pause as the designer waited for his response. Nige fumbled. Finally, he reached into his pocket, pulled out one of his property surveyor business cards and handed that over.
‘Likewise,’ he said, ‘if I can ever offer you any help with . . .’ He paused ‘. . . with buying a shopping centre. Just let me know,’ he finished buoyantly. The man stood bewildered as we walked away. Shopping centre? What the hell was he on about?
Nige’s sense of humour never faltered. In the cold times ahead, when he began to suffer frostbite in his feet as we emerged from the Icelandic storm, he still managed to mumble to me over the wind, ‘How do you think Mohammed the curry waiter would cope with this right now, right here, balancing forty poppadoms on his trolley?’
I asked Nige right at the start if he would join the expedition, and he didn’t hesitate. He was working for Lunson Mitchenall, a firm of London surveyors. But this was his chance to do something more, something extraordinary, and he knew it. Most important, he went for it, and that’s not always easy to do.
For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of these adventures is that they can become a genuinely life-changing experience. I’ve seen it so often. It gives people pride. It may be very quiet but it’s there. And it’s a great thing to see.
Right from the start, Nige proved a huge support to me. We discussed the expedition endlessly, and he helped me prepare the brochures that we sent out to prospective sponsors. He would stay up late at home on weeknights to print out another batch for me. They’d always be dropped off at the barge by morning. I know that I would never have got the expedition off the ground without him.
It was with Nige that I’d spend hours gathering information, constantly weighing up the pros and cons of routes, boat designs, e
quipment and every aspect of the expedition. Some of what we were doing as a team was new to him, and he was one of two team members who had not had the benefit of a military training, but as time went on he responded and picked things up remarkably quickly.
My nature is to speak my mind – I always have. I dislike petty jibes or undertones, I would prefer someone to say what they mean up front. It comes from having an older sister. I think it’s best to try to be honest and clear the air, even if it makes us very vulnerable. What matters is that I know everyone in the long term appreciates honesty.
One evening I felt Nige was being difficult about something and I just came out with it. ‘What’s up, Nige? Why did you say that?’ He mumbled something and we carried on, and to be honest I forgot all about it. Until three o’clock the following morning, that is, when Nige rang to say he couldn’t sleep because he’d been worrying about what he’d said. He was sorry and hadn’t meant it. I told him it was fine, it was nothing – it wasn’t. I was impressed though. That sort of thing is not always easy to do. But Nige is that kind of sensitive, endearing person. He makes the calls we all so often put off. I knew he would be an important man to have on board.
Charlie Laing was a year ahead of me at school. We’d always known each other and got along pretty well, but we’d never been close friends. I probably only saw him twice during the ten years that had passed since we had left, maybe across the room at a party.
Then he telephoned me out of the blue. Shara and I were living in Chamonix, in the Alps, at the time, and Charlie had gone to considerable lengths to get our telephone number. He asked if he could meet me to talk about this next expedition and said he would email over his CV. Since school he had become a freelance cameraman, and had put together an impressive portfolio: among other projects, he’d worked on Tonight with Trevor McDonald and Stars in their Eyes and had produced a twelve-part documentary on the eccentric side of American life.