Sir Wally Herbert

No sooner have I written about various explorers than one of the greatest contemporary British explorers sadly dies.

At the AGI conference last year I was fascinated and riveted by a talk given by Sir Wally Herbert's daughter, Kari, about her time living among the Inuit of Greenland both as a young child and subsequently. It was a life she had not chosen, she was too young, but one which she embraced with enthusaism.

Now her father has died, but rather than sadness the emotion must be of one of admiration for someone who lived life to the full, tested himself to the limits of human endurance and hightlighted the triviality of most of the difficulties which the rest of us face. I repeat here the obituary from today's Times newspaper.

The leader of the first expedition to make a surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest axis, through the North Pole, Wally Herbert was “the explorer’s explorer”. Sir Ranulph Fiennes called him the “greatest polar explorer of our time”. He proved his courage and determination time and again in both the Arctic and Antarctic, travelling more than 25,000 miles by dog sledge and open boats, and mapping 46,000 square miles of previously uncharted territory.
He loved the romance of exploration, and wrote a book about Antarctic men in blank verse. He relished the harshness and simplicity of the icy wastes. Though he rarely lost his temper, he was not to be thwarted, and long before he was finally knighted, his men would refer to him as “Sir Walter”.
Born into an English military family in 1934, Walter William Herbert served in the Royal Engineers, 1953-55, training at the School of Military Survey before learning the rudiments of navigation in the Suez Canal zone. He next worked as a surveyor in Shoreham-by-Sea until an entrée into the world of polar exploration literally dropped into his lap. A newspaper, fortuitously opened at an advertisement for men to join Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, fell from the luggage rack of a bus as he was commuting to work, with the result that he spent the years 1955-58 in the Antarctic, travelling with dog teams to map hitherto unvisited areas.
Being the first recorded human being to stand in a particular spot and the first to map a whole new area was always, for him, an exhilarating feeling. “We were a world of men in harmony with our environment,” he wrote of that first Antarctic experience. “We saw a paradise in snowscapes and heard music in the wind, for we were young, and on our long exploratory journeys we felt with the pride of youth that we were making history.”
Antarctica’s supply of virgin territory was dwindling fast under the onslaught of motorised expeditions, but 80 per cent of the Arctic was still uncharted. Therefore, his next big project was at the other end of the globe, where he planned to make the first surface crossing of the frozen Arctic Ocean by its longest axis, taking in the North Pole en route. Herbert considered this to be the last remaining element of a daunting trinity of challenges, the others being the ascent of Everest and the first surface crossing of the Antarctic ice cap.
His plan to walk “across the top of the world” involved traversing the more or less frozen Arctic Ocean, from Alaska via the North Pole to Spitsbergen, with the use of modern and traditional aids: radios, homing beacons and satellite information as well as dogs and sledges. In the four years, 1964-68, that it took him to plan the trip he would either spend 15 hours a day at his typewriter, drumming up what support he could from polar experts all over the world to help him to win the vital backing of the Royal Geographical Society, or would motor 260 miles a day between his parents’ house in Lichfield and the expedition’s headquarters in London. He often arrived in such a state of stress, despite tranquillisers, that he would have to shut himself away to unwind before getting down to business.
A spell of field training forestalled total collapse: he made a useful 1,200-mile dog-sledging journey across Smith Sound and through the Canadian North West Territories to test equipment and men – and finally, the British Trans-Arctic Expedition was ready.
Herbert, with his team – Allan Gill, Fritz Koerner and Kenneth Hedges, plus four heavily laden sledges and 34 huskies – set out from Point Barrow on February 21, 1968. On the map it was a 2,000-mile journey, but they all knew that the constant shifting of the ice could greatly inflate that mileage. Herbert and his colleagues, who would be spending a year and a half on the ice, would have to be ready every night for the sound of the sudden splitting or pressuring that would mean they had to move dogs, tons of equipment and themselves on to a new floe in double quick time.
Modern radio communications proved a mixed blessing. When Gill badly injured his back and the expedition committee in London radioed an order for his immediate evacuation, Herbert was incensed. The committee retaliated by suggesting that his opposition was due to “winteritis” warping his judgment. But in the words of a reporter for The Sunday Times, which shared exclusive newspaper rights to the expedition story with The Times: “Herbert has his faults – a Napoleonic sense of drama, impetuosity and a tendency to think too much in a loud clear voice – but he is a long way from going barmy. He wanted Gill to stay for the winter because the Arctic is Gill’s life and any alternative, death included, would be preferable to the stigma of failure during an expedition.”
Gill stayed, and gradually regained his strength. But the incident made Herbert enemies when some of his indignant remarks were relayed to a large readership. After this and other delays, it was only by dint of forced marches that the team reached the North Pole on April 6, 1969.
Arguably the worst of their journey lay ahead, with the ice splitting all around them as temperatures rose. But in mid-May they at last sighted land, and on May 29 an exhausted Hedges and Gill, his injury forgotten, summoned up the strength and the willpower to scramble on to Small Blackboard Island off the northeast coast of Spitsbergen, 3,620 miles after leaving Point Barrow.
Only half the team having landed, in Herbert’s eyes it was not the triumph he had hoped for, and he was further disappointed when the expedition’s achievement was, as he saw it, overshadowed in the eyes of the world by the almost simultaneous exploits of a new generation of explorers: the Apollo 10 astronauts, who were taking their first pictures of Earth from the Moon just as Herbert and his team were sighting land.
Yet the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, rightly called his achievement “a feat of endurance which ranks with any in polar history”, and the expedition’s patron, the Duke of Edinburgh, numbered it “among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance”.
On his return from the Arctic, Herbert married Marie McGaughey, who not only understood his obsession with polar travel but was even prepared to share it with him. Two years later, with Marie and their ten-month-old daughter Kari, he journeyed to Qeqertarsuaq in northwest Greenland to spend two years living with the Inuit, recording their way of life before it was changed for ever by the incursions of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Hitherto a rather solitary man, he was greatly helped in his information-gathering by his wife’s gregariousness and the spontaneity of their tiny daughter, whose stay in the Arctic had been sponsored by Heinz but who was soon, with her mother, enjoying the sort of food that revolted Herbert, including the skulls and brains of little auks, cooked whole. When his daughter returned to Britain and a shop assistant overheard her talking Inuit, he relished the woman’s inevitable comment, “Oh well, it’s always nice to have a second language.”
After a sortie to Lapland in 1975 Herbert led an expedition in 1978-82 which attempted the first circumnavigation of the Greenland coast by dog sledge and skin boat, an enterprise that had to be abandoned after severe weather, problems with unseaworthy boats and expensive air rescues. This project never captured the imagination of public or press, but Herbert’s efforts won him renewed respect from his peers.
The death of his second daughter, Pascale, in an electrical accident in 1993, when she was 15, left Herbert devastated. Only a few years before, he had had a quadruple heart bypass, and after these two crises, painting and drawing pictures based on his many expeditions began to take up his time at home at Laggan in Inverness-shire. There were one-man exhibitions on several continents, and two of his works ended up in royal collections.
Among his books were A World of Men (1968), Across the Top of the World (1969), The Last Great Journey on Earth (1971), Eskimos (1976), Hunters of the Polar North (1982), The Noose of Laurels (1989), a controversial study which disputed Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole, and The Third Pole (2003).
Knighted in 2000, Herbert was also a joint honorary president of the World Expeditionary Association and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His awards included a Polar Medal in 1962 and its clasp in 1969; the Livingstone Gold Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, 1969; and the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1970.
He is survived by his wife and their elder daughter.
Sir Wally Herbert, polar explorer, was born on October 24, 1934. He died of heart trouble on June 12, 2007, aged 72