Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  This left Jack and me. Things only got worse. Jack sprained his ankle and we lost all signs of any trail to the south. Rations were running out and eventually the only course was to return to Skook’s and start again. Skook could not understand how we had missed the trail, but it was a long time since he had been on it. We set out again, but Jack’s ankle was worse than before. Crying with frustration, he agreed he too had to give up. He gave me his pistol and we shook hands.

  Route-finding continued to be a nightmare. I was ready to throw in the towel myself until the possibility occurred to me that the local Sikanee Indians might have moved Skook’s trail across the river. I waded across and six hours later picked up the clearly marked triple slash which indicated their traplines. Forgetting sores, hunger and blisters, I covered the next twenty miles in two days to the headwaters of the Kechika, high on the flats of the Sifton Pass, a cheerful place of flowering plants and berry bushes. This was good trapping country, flush with beaver, marten, mink and otter. Now the Indian trail became easy to see, no longer a will-o’-the-wisp passage through undergrowth but a trodden path with blaze marks every few yards.

  Late in the afternoon after crossing the pass I rounded a bend to find Jack and Joe hunting squirrels and they led me down to their camp at Fox Lake where the film crew were also installed.

  Everyone seemed rather subdued. There was no welcome for me. Jack brought me tea and a pot of stew and, when the others were out of hearing, told me what was going on. ‘The Beeb are out to get yoo’s, Ran,’ summed up the situation. He explained how the film team had been passing the waiting time prompting Stanley and Joe to complain about their treatment on tape. They had pictures of the diminutive Stanley staggering about under the weight of his pack. They had film of Joe declaring that ‘Ran couldna’ organise a piss-up in a brewery’, and by way of proof that I was an egomaniac glory-seeker, the suggestion that I had encouraged the others to drop out so I could cross the Rocky Mountain Trench all by myself. On top of everything else I was plainly a lousy navigator. All that was now needed was for the journey to fail somewhere along the miles of violent rivers to our south. Then the BBC could make a fascinating in-depth study of leadership failure.

  To select the perfect expeditionary team, in my opinion, is nearly impossible. There is no foolproof selection process and the longer, the more ambitious the endeavour, the more time there is for each person’s failings to rise to the surface. The most I hope for is to find at least one true companion on each journey. In Canada I was lucky. Jack became a loyal lifelong friend, a man I would ask again on any expedition and trust whatever the stresses.

  We launched ourselves back on the river at Fort Ware then followed the boisterous Finlay, the log-jammed, storm-tossed Williston lake, the mosquito and black-fly-infested Parsnip, Pack and Crookford Rivers until at last we reached Summit Lake. One night Ginny, waiting to contact us in a thickly forested swamp beside the river, was surprised by a black bear. She lost her nerve and screamed. The bear came closer and she pulled her .38 Smith and Wesson out of her anorak pocket. Somehow she pressed the trigger before the gun was clear and a bullet passed through the outside welt of her rubber boot, within a couple of millimetres of her foot. The bear departed and so did a terrified Ginny. Next time I met her she was furious. Why had I not made the rendezvous? Why did she have to wander through stinking woods and portage heavy gear? Nobody ever thanked or acknowledged her. I did, I pointed out.

  ‘No, you don’t. You just use me. You couldn’t care less what happens to me so long as I’m in the right place at the right time.’

  I did not try to argue as, by that time in our marriage, I knew that would be useless. Instead I thought of my favourite quote from Albert Einstein: ‘Some men spend a lifetime in an attempt to comprehend the complexities of women. Others preoccupy themselves with simpler tasks such as understanding the theory of relativity.’

  All the rivers we had travelled prior to reaching Summit Lake had flowed to an Arctic destination. Summit Lake was a dead-end, a high-altitude source of this Arctic watershed. To continue south we carried our boats nine miles along the ancient Giscombe Portage trail, over the Intercontinental Divide and down to the Pacific watershed and the biggest river of British Columbia, named after the great Scots explorer Simon Fraser.

  We launched the boats on to the Fraser River late on 20 September and within minutes swept over the Giscombe Rapids wearing black frogsuits and life-jackets. From Giscombe, the river, the lifeline but also grave of so many pioneers, flowed for 850 tempestuous miles to Vancouver and the sea. Between Prince George, British Columbia’s most northerly city, and the Fraser-side town of Lytton the river drops 1,200 feet, four times the height of Niagara Falls. Seventy miles south of Prince George it penetrates a deep trough many hundreds of feet below the surrounding land mass. The uncertainty of not knowing the state of the river in the boiling canyons ahead wore at all our nerves. When we attempted to glean local knowledge along the way we were met by the universal response that nobody knew what ‘the river does down there’.

  We entered the Moran Canyon, a rushing, roiling cauldron squeezed between black walls 1,000 feet high. The underplay of currents was impressive. Huge surface boils, bubbling like hot water in a saucepan, twice turned us about completely and thrust us chaff-like against the granite walls. By nightfall we stopped a mile above the great killer rapid of the Bridge River confluence. The press were waiting in Lillooet below the Bridge River Falls, licking their lips.

  When the time came to run the falls, Stanley climbed on to our boat as though it were a tumbrel. The film team waved from a high boulder. I pushed the boat off and sprang aboard. Plucked from the bank like a feather we plunged into the white water. A roar like the thunder of doom rushed at us as we shot downwards. For a while I could see nothing. We were awash within a cartwheeling tunnel. The craft keeled over, forced to the side of a monster wave by centrifugal force. It was a wall of death on the horizontal plane and our hull clung to the inner side of the spinning liquid tube. At the lower end the boat was gripped by an undertow, dragged around and around, then spat out into a whirlpool. Our outboard roared frantically as we swung around the sinkhole and the cliffs of the river disappeared as we sank deep within the river’s bowels. Then the sinkhole closed and regurgitated us towards the left-hand cliff. Stanley, water gushing from his helmet, tried to steer away from the rocks. He failed and we dashed against a boulder. The hull screamed in rubbery protest and crumpled along one side as the tube split open. But we were through. We shook hands and felt on top of the world. Our second boat also managed to defy the Bridge River Rapids.

  After repairing the boats we continued south as the river flowed fast and furious through the Coastal Range and the Fraser’s final monster rapid, Hell’s Gate. Four days later we passed through the suburbs of Vancouver and navigated with care into a Pacific sea fog until a police launch met us with a bullhorn. ‘This is it, folks. You’re in Yank territory now.’

  The two BBC films that were made from this expedition led their sixteen million-strong British audience to believe I was a cruel and incompetent publicity-seeker. The innuendoes which helped paint this picture certainly added spice and colour to the films, but did surprisingly little to discourage my sponsors in the future and helped me in a small way to develop a tougher skin when later expeditions were laid open to public scrutiny and criticism in the future.

  Jack and Stanley left the Army a year after the expedition and emigrated to Western Canada where they both married. Jack called one of his sons Ranulph.

  5

  Ginny’s Idea

  Early in 1972, Ginny was stirring the stew when she came up with a weird suggestion. ‘Why don’t we go around the world?’ She had mooted the idea once before in Scotland, and I had ignored it as impractical because what she envisaged was a longitudinal route – through the Poles – which was, I knew, neither physically nor administratively possible. A year passed and with no other projects on hand, we visited the Royal G
eographical Society’s map vaults and, grudgingly, I began to accept that her idea might after all be feasible. We could follow the Greenwich Meridian around the world’s axis. We could start at Greenwich and head south to Antarctica, then up the other side of the planet, over the North Pole and back to Greenwich. A simple plan on the face of it.

  For the next seven years we worked non-stop and unpaid to launch the endeavour, during which we often despaired of eventual success. Luck and hard work saw us through. At the weekends and on free evenings we lectured in civic centres, borstals, ladies’ luncheon clubs and men’s associations. We attacked the problem with total dedication and a determination that every item of equipment, every last shoelace and drawing pin, must be sponsored. We opened no bank account and possessed no chequebook, so there was no danger of the expedition overspending.

  In the beginning I approached my 21st SAS Regiment CO to see whether the SAS group of regiments would sponsor the expedition. But the Director of the SAS, a brigadier, at first refused to consider the idea because of my involvement with the Castle Combe raid. ‘This expedition,’ the brigadier expostulated to our CO, ‘is unbelievably complex and ambitious. That Fiennes is not a responsible person. I can tell you straightaway that the SAS will not attach their good name to a plan such as this under a fellow like Fiennes.’

  We were disappointed to hear the CO’s account of his meeting. But a week later he summoned us to his office. They had evolved a workable solution. Brigadier Mike Wingate Gray, who, as CO of the regular SAS seven years before, had sent me packing after the Castle Combe incident, was appointed overall boss of the Transglobe Expedition. If I accepted his loose supervision, then the SAS group would nominally sponsor the whole venture and provide us with office space in the Duke of York’s Barracks just off the King’s Road, Chelsea. We were in business.

  Over the next two years our new office, a high attic which had earlier served as the 21 SAS rifle range, filled with sponsored equipment and its walls became papered with maps showing the more remote stretches of our proposed 52,000-mile journey. There was no telephone in the attic, but a friend who was a telephone engineer and Territorial trooper fixed up a phone one night which he clipped into the rooftop Ministry of Defence line. This was critical, since no phone meant no contact with sponsors. The expedition aim was that a core group of our team must travel over the entire surface of the world via both Poles without flying one yard of the way.

  Early in 1975 Ginny, who was to be chief radio operator and mobile base leader, joined the Women’s Royal Army Corps to learn about radios, antenna theory and speedy Morse operation. Oliver Shepard, a 21 SAS lieutenant, applied to join us. He looked overweight. I remembered him vaguely from Eton and had decided he was definitely not Transglobe material. By then we had a system of testing all volunteers in North Wales. Each weekend that winter and over the next two years, the Territorial SAS provided army trucks and rations for me to train a mountain racing team in Snowdonia and, from the team hopefuls, about sixty SAS men in all, I would pick the three best ones for the expedition. Oliver Shepard joined the Welsh training weekends and proved to be more determined than he looked. He resigned his job and slept on a floor in the barracks, breakfasting on expedition rations and working evenings in a nearby pub, the Admiral Codrington. Oliver introduced me to an out-of-work friend named Charlie Burton, who had spent four years as a private soldier in an infantry regiment. His rugged face bore a pattern of rugby and boxing scars. Charlie passed the Territorial SAS selection course and joined our Welsh mountain training sessions. So too did Geoff Newman, who gave up his career with a printing firm. Finally, a part-time secretary, Mary Gibbs, joined us as nurse and generator mechanic. The six of us seemed to work well together, despite the strain of the tiny office and single telephone. By the autumn of 1975 we were sponsored by over 800 companies.

  Andrew Croft, an Arctic explorer of note, advised me: ‘Three men is a good number if you all get on. Two men is relatively suicidal. Four men can create cliques of two. In extremis, with three men, two can gang up against the leader. My advice is that you should decide whether to have two or three companions only after you have seen your potential colleagues in action during trials in the Arctic.’

  From the moment Ginny and I started our joint struggle to launch Transglobe, we began to grow together. Our continued dedication to the venture survived even our total lack of know-how in all polar matters, the assurance of experts that our plans were impossibly ambitious and the long morale-sapping years of negative responses. For four or five years the British Antarctic Survey and the Royal Geographical Society (without whose blessing it would have been impossible, short of being a millionaire, to enter Antarctica) genuinely believed the projected journey to be hopelessly ambitious and probably impossible. Our prospects were summed up by one of Britain’s polar godfathers, Sir Miles Clifford, an ex-director of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey. ‘You are saying, Fiennes, that your group will, in the course of a single journey, complete the greatest journeys of Scott, Amundsen, Nansen, Peary, Franklin and many others. You must understand that this sounds a touch presumptuous, if not indeed far-fetched.’

  Sir Vivian Fuchs advised me that we could not hope to achieve Transglobe without polar training, so I began to plan two separate trial journeys. The first, to the Greenland Ice-cap in 1976, would train us for similar terrain in Antarctica. Next, in 1977, as there was nowhere suitable merely to simulate the Arctic, we would try to reach the North Pole itself.

  Ginny’s painstaking lobbying with the Ministry of Defence gained us permission for our first polar training and after four years in our barracks office, the RAF flew us to Greenland in July 1976 with 30,000 pounds of equipment. We landed at a US forces airbase in the north-west of the great ice-bound island. Along with two similar sites, one at Fylingdales in Yorkshire and the other at Clear in Alaska, this base formed part of a Soviet missile-spotting radar screen across the top of the world. Hills of grey gravel enfolded the base and eight miles inland we could see the rim of the ice-cap which covers all of Greenland save for the rock-girt fringes.

  The redoubtable polar traveller Wally Herbert had advised me that fur parkas are unbeatable for Arctic winter travel. He also recommended that the ice-covered parts of our journey would best be attempted by some sort of machine rather than by dog teams, since we did not have time for the couple of years he considered essential for intensive dog-handling training. The snowcats we were going to use, which we called Groundhogs, were fitted with home-made buoyancy bags, and would float, swim and steer reasonably well between the cruising islands of pack-ice. Each towed two 1,000-pound sledge-loads separated by long safety lines.

  During our first week on the Greenland Ice-cap a two-day blizzard kept us tent-bound and we learned simple lessons which would have been second nature to seasoned polar travellers: which way not to position the tent’s entrance; how not to leave anything anywhere except on a Groundhog or inside the tent; how to string the radio’s antenna wires to ski sticks rather than laying them along the snow surface where, after a blow, they became hard to dig out without damage. We quickly determined that snow for melting for drinks would come from one side of the tent foyer and the ‘loo’ would be on the other.

  The Groundhogs, which started easily at temperatures down to –10°C, thereafter revolted and, on our first –20°C day they failed to respond to the electric circuit or the manual crank until Oliver poured the two Thermos flasks of hot chocolate, prepared for the day’s travel, over the starter motors, whereupon the engines roared into life. Over the next months these machines caused non-stop trouble. The vehicle manuals were all in German which did not help, being beyond the scope of my hard-won O-level in that language.

  I learned that neither my jungle nor my desert experience helped me much as ice-cap navigator, for the cold made my hand compass frustratingly slow to settle, while all manner of new problems cropped up to confuse and hinder accurate use of the theodolite. My first computed theodolite posi
tion in Greenland, following altitude shots of the sun at noon, was wrong by some sixty-two nautical miles. As our Groundhogs twisted their way through narrow snow valleys beneath the coastal mountains I used obvious features for compass backbearings. Later we climbed on to the inner ice-fields of the Hayes Peninsula, passing between heavily crevassed slopes. Blizzards pinned us down, inclines overturned the heavy sledges, throttles jammed, carburettors blocked, fuel lines leaked, a gearbox gasket blew and sprocket tyres shot off, landing up to sixty feet away. Finally we ran into serious trouble when both Groundhogs plunged into crevasses at the same time. We spent three precarious days tunnelling down to and under the stricken machines to retrieve them with pulleys and aluminium ramps.

  But by the end of our ordeal we were working well together. Oliver’s mechanical procedures were slick and we could strike or break camp in under an hour, compared with six hours a month before. Although no polar veterans, we had mastered deep snow ice-cap travel in temperatures of –20°C. The next step, a different game in every sense, was apprenticeship to Arctic Ocean ice-floe travel in temperatures of –40°C.

  I arrived back in London from Greenland weighing thirteen stone. Over the next three ‘office-bound’ months I lost sixteen pounds and grew my first grey hairs as every possible political hurdle that might hinder our Arctic Ocean training plans was raised by the authorities. With limitless funds, we could have bought our way around most obstacles but we were, in Oliver’s words, ‘skint as squirrels’. In desperation I explained our immediate requirement – £60,000 to charter a ski-plane – to my old Dhofar contact, Tim Landon, and he introduced me to a wealthy Omani businessman, Dr Omar Zawawi, whose company agreed to sponsor the cost. In February 1977 a chartered DC6 flew the six of us into the polar darkness to try for the Pole.