Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Panic can arise from fear of failure, leading to the sudden collapse of the reservoir of willpower needed to sustain enormous effort and discomfort for long periods. Mike and I had already discovered the best way to keep panic at bay is to have a bank of prepared positive thoughts you can produce on demand. For example, when approaching a crevasse field, it is a great help to conduct a mental rehearsal of exactly what you will do, step by step, should you plunge into the maw of a 100-foot fissure. Thoughts can also be stretched out to help the long hours and slow miles pass by without constantly dwelling on the sheer size of the task ahead and the slow and painful breakdown of your body. Mike’s term for getting lost in his thoughts was ‘mind-travelling’.

  Sometimes I would check my watch only to find to my disgust that a really excellent run of absorbing thoughts had after all only eliminated a few minutes of reality. I often wished to howl like a dog, anything to master my thoughts and banish the insistent desire to halt because the whole task was simply too hard and hurt too much. I would imagine that my grandfather, a pioneer in Canada and Africa, my father and my uncle, both killed in the world wars, and I knew my living family were all right behind me, willing me on. As the last mountain peaks passed by with infinite slowness, I imagined that I was hauling a heavy sledge at a gulag in Siberia, that I was undernourished and poorly clothed, and I would chant, in time to the creak of my sticks, ‘Gulag, gulag, gulag.’ The extra responsibility of solo travel weighs heavily.

  On the night of my twenty-third day, Morag sent me a message from Børge Ousland’s base leader at Patriot Hills. Børge had passed the moraine zone in conditions of good visibility and had kindly radioed to warn me of an uncharted crevasse field. By the time I received the information, I had already passed that particular area of danger. But I was grateful for his thoughtfulness. Falling into a crevasse is a bad idea at any time, but doing so alone in Antarctica can lead to a slow and lonely death, for many are mere narrow slits that can trap a human body in a slowly tightening embrace. I was fairly adept at spotting the tell-tale shadowy hollowing of crevasse lids, but many blind crevasses are so well lidded as to be invisible.

  On my twenty-fifth day I was sick a few minutes after eating breakfast gruel. I felt faint and started out four hours behind schedule on a fine sunny day, neither too hot nor too cold. In six hours I manhauled six miles, despite a long, steep climb. The improved surface continued but I felt queasy and took two Imodium tablets.

  A muffled explosion sounded, vibrating through the snow under my skis. Then two further rumbles in quick succession. Either avalanches or imploding snow-bridges in the great, largely uncharted, crevasse fields to my immediate west. Behind me the deep tracks of my runners disappeared to the north, where countless mountain peaks shimmered as though floating on waves of air. Ahead lay only a blue sky and the gently sloping snowfields leading without further obstruction to the South Pole. I was halfway to the Pole and 125 miles ahead of the point Mike and I had reached in the same time in 1993. I tried not to feel over-optimistic. Things could still go wrong.

  To my surprise, I was violently sick again after eating my evening meal, a delicious mixture of ghee milk fat with rehydrated shepherd’s pie and Smash mashed potato. I stared at the results on the tent floor and wondered how I could recycle the mess, since I had towed that ration for 400 miles and it represented energy for ten miles of further manhauling. I informed Morag that night that I had been sick, but was uncertain why, since I did not have diarrhoea. She told me to call her at any time if the symptoms persisted so she could relay advice from the camp doctor at Patriot Hill.

  Two hours later the first cramps attacked my gut and I recognised at once the symptoms of a kidney stone blockage. The pains of a kidney stone, doctors say, are very similar to those of birth contractions – except that they don’t produce such a wonderful result. I knew the pain only too well. In 1990 I had had a similar attack on a floating Soviet scientific sea-ice base 200 miles from the North Pole. Another time I had been working in an office, and the stone had been removed surgically within two days. I lit my cooker and heated water. I would flush the bloody thing out of my system. Drown it with water. Groaning and talking aloud, I wrenched open the medical pack that Mike had meticulously prepared in the knowledge of my 1990 attack which he had treated.

  I gulped down morphine substitute tablets, two Buscopan anti-pain pills and inserted a Voltarol suppository for quick pain relief. Within half an hour the initial pains, which I think I can safely describe as excruciating, had dulled to a background throb. But the relief didn’t last.

  No living cell can withstand much change to its environment. Even slight changes in acidity will kill a highly developed structure such as a human nerve cell. That’s why we have kidneys: to prevent such changes in our bodies. Fifteen gallons of blood flow through the kidneys every hour and a minimum of one pint of water per day is needed to wash away all the harmful waste products that collect there. My doctor had recommended six pints a day. But I had been saving fuel instead of melting snow on my stove for drinking water, and now a chip of calcium in my urinary tract had me writhing on the ground. Had the Gestapo been involved I would have told them anything just to lessen the pain.

  For six hours, every hour on the hour, I tried to call Morag. My home-made radio set was the brainchild of her husband, Flo, who had put it together in their Aberdeenshire kitchen. Once I briefly heard Morag calling ‘Victor Lima, Victor Lima’, my call sign. Then her voice faded into the electronic disturbances that cluttered the ionosphere. Flo had warned us, via the powerful transmitter in his garden, that severe geomagnetic disturbances were likely to cut communication for several days. I feared that, by the time I eventually made contact, bad weather would leave me stranded for further days, without relief.

  At the moment the weather was excellent. I yearned to be on my way. Since I was eating nothing and using fuel only to heat snow for water rather than to heat the tent, I was not technically reducing my overall chances of success. True, Ousland was ahead of me and widening the distance, while Kaminski and the Koreans were creeping up from behind. But there was no way I could carry on until I had shifted the stone from my urinary tract. When I finally made brief contact with Morag, the doctor at her camp – a former flying medic from north-west Australia – advised me to take pain-killers every six hours and drink lots of water. For twenty-four hours, possibly the least enjoyable period I can remember ever having spent, I took more pain-killers than the doctor had advised and drank a great deal of water, but the stone failed to shift and the pains from my lower stomach, back and sides stayed with me. For an hour or so after each intake of MST, Voltarol and Buscopan the pain was muted and my desire to continue the journey mounted. Then the dreaded spasms returned with ever-increasing intensity, and I writhed about on the cold floor of the tent clasping my flanks and rolling into a foetal ball incapable of constructive thought processes.

  At 11.00 a.m. on 27 December, with two days of tablets left, I decided that the danger of irreparable damage to my kidneys, as well as the risk of running out of pain-killers, was too great a price to pay for the chance of being first to cross the Antarctic solo. I pulled the pin of my emergency beacon which, a few hours later, informed a satellite signal watcher in England, who called Morag, who in turn alerted the Twin Otter ski-plane crew at Patriot Hills as to my exact position.

  Nine hours later, with the fine weather beginning to change, the Twin Otter landed by my tent. Throughout the flight back to Patriot Hills, the Australian doctor fed morphine into my blood system through a drip. I was soon completely stoned and in wonderful, painless bliss. Morag recorded: ‘I was quite shocked when I saw you, as you were in huge distress. We took you down to the camp after securing you on a stretcher.’ My journey had ended almost exactly halfway to the South Pole and a quarter of the way to my destination on the far side of the continent.

  Even if I had not been zapped by a kidney stone, Ousland with his superior para-wing skills would have beaten m
e. He made the crossing in fifty-five days, having sailed for over three-quarters of them. My congratulatory signal was at Scott Base to greet him when he arrived. Kaminski and the SoHos reached the Pole too late to continue.

  Morag called my medical insurers, who advised immediate evacuation to a clinic in Punta Arenas. The weather, miraculously, held just long enough for me to fly on a stretcher on a scheduled Hercules flight from Patriot Hills to Punta. After an exhaustive series of x-rays, an enema and fluid injections, the Punta surgeon sent a report to my insurers, who advised that, should I then, or at any time in the future, try such a journey again, they could no longer cover any further stone-related costs. Although the stone had shifted once the morphine had relaxed my nervous system, the condition could return at any time. Any future Antarctic evacuation flight could cost over £100,000 with no insurance cover. I would have to make do with the 1980 and 1993 Antarctic crossings.

  Assessing the whole enterprise afterwards, my big mistake, I realised, had been concentrating during training on manhaul fitness rather than on becoming a wind-assistance expert. Using wind assistance with kites or para-wings is very different from using following-wind devices such as parachutes or dinghy sails, employed by Amundsen, Shackleton and Scott. The toil and the suffering is cut to a minimum and that, after all, is what leads to success.

  Back at home a month later James Dyson called to say the Breakthrough fundraisers had already raised £1.7 million and that he would personally add £700,000 to that total. He had produced a new ‘polar-blue’ Dyson model that month, and £10 from the sale of each unit was added to our fund. Many housewives bought his vacuum cleaners and, at the time, one in every twelve British women was being hit by breast cancer. The money raised by the expedition, even though it failed to achieve its physical goal, allowed Breakthrough to help set up Europe’s first dedicated breast cancer research centre.

  13

  Sorry Straits

  Trying to plan and organise two expeditions at the same time is something I have usually avoided, but whilst I was training for the solo Antarctic crossing in 1995 I was approached by a Canadian professor in his sixties with an unusual plan which he had named Transglobal. This would involve the first overland crossing of the world on a set of wheels. I met and immediately liked Gordon Thomas, who went by the nickname of Sockeye, and agreed to co-lead Transglobal. I would organise the West European sector of the journey, Dmitry Shparo, who had helped organise our 1990 North Pole bid, would handle the Soviet Union, and Sockeye would deal with North America.

  Earth’s widest west-east landmass stretches 21,000 miles from Clogher Head in south-west Ireland to St John’s in Newfoundland. Various bits of water get in the way en route, including the Irish Sea, the English Channel, the Bering Strait and the Gulf of St Lawrence between the Canadian mainland and Newfoundland. So our vehicles would need to be amphibious. Ford had recently failed in a well-publicised quest to motor across the semi-frozen Bering Strait, but I had a longstanding love for Land Rovers and approached their then owners, BMW, who agreed to sponsor us with three vehicles and a budget of £300,000 to include the cost of rendering them amphibious.

  Whilst preparing for the Antarctic expedition, I had also spent time on the Transglobal plans and had visited many vehicle components suppliers, winch manufacturers and design engineers. Eventually a method of making Land Rovers swim emerged, so I asked the Prince of Wales to be patron once again. He agreed and nominated the charity we would work with as the Macmillan Cancer Relief Fund. I called Terry Lloyd and the senior Foreign News Editor at ITN, who agreed to send a team on the expedition. Because I needed to concentrate on Antarctic preparations, I asked Anton Bowring to take over organising the European and the ocean-crossing sections of Transglobal. Flo and Morag Howell agreed to handle all the communications, whilst Charlie Burton and Oliver Shepard dealt with many of the sponsors. They also agreed to run a selection course in Wales to choose suitable individuals for the Land Rover team.

  Steve Holland, an old friend from British Aerospace who had helped design my manhaul sledges for many years, joined our team, and we approached a famous yachtsman from Cornwall, Pete Goss, to help design a catamaran-shaped float which could be pulled over sea-ice by a Land Rover. On reaching open sea the vehicle could then push the float into the water, drive up ramps on to the float and provide the motor to power the float.

  I went to Antarctica and left the rest of the team to progress with the Transglobal plans. Dmitry in Russia and Sockeye in Canada did various reconnaissance journeys up north to check likely routes through the most difficult regions. Dmitry was by far the most active of Russian explorers and his fame right across Siberia ensured that regional bosses would cause us minimal bureaucratic delays, even in those chaotic post-glasnost and perestroika times.

  Dmitry, born in 1941, was a teacher in Moscow who, in the seventies, had risked the wrath of the Politburo by leading a North Pole expedition which they had expressly forbidden. When it proved a success the authorities changed their attitude, Dmitry became a Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin and never looked back. Nobody could be better suited to handling the mammoth task of organising our trans-Russia drive.

  On hearing that a rival Fiat expedition was making claims that confused the exact goal of what we were attempting, we clarified our precise aim as ‘attempting to achieve the first self-propelled journey around earth’s horizontal landmass’.

  Charlie and Oliver’s selection course produced a tough, bossy, highly self-confident and much given to complaining New Zealander who had a superlative record in vehicle maintenance and recovery in extreme regions of the world. Looking at his CV and comparing it with Oliver’s second choice, an ex-RAF officer with comparatively little vehicle experience but really good character references, I was surprised and a touch apprehensive. However, Charlie and the other selectors were all in agreement, so I accepted their judgment.

  That summer we all assembled at the Royal Marines amphibious testing area at Barnstaple in Devon. There was no public access to Instow Bay so, if our prototype amphibious Land Rover were to sink, the press could not take embarrassing photos. But all went well and our subsequent debrief sent the nine engineers involved in the amphibian’s design scurrying off to complete various modifications in readiness for the Alaskan trials we planned for the spring of 1997.

  Sockeye had selected the Inuit village of Prince of Wales as our trials site since we would land there after crossing the Bering Strait from Russia on the main journey. It made sense to try the vehicles out in the exact sea-ice conditions that we would encounter and, on the landward side of Prince of Wales, high snowbound mountains would also have to be crossed, using prototype track and winch methods. These too must be tried out.

  Even Sockeye knew little about Prince of Wales and its inhabitants. Captain James Cook charted the Bering Strait for the Royal Navy in the 1770s and named it after an efficient but timid Danish navigator, Vitus Bering, who worked for Tsar Peter the Great and, fifty years before Cook, had sailed a Russian ship into the strait but failed to reach the American coast or even to spot it through thick fog. Russia did, however, possess colonies in Alaska with some 600 Russian settlers in the 1860s and, had the Soviet Union still owned the region during the Cold War, President Kennedy might have found things even more troublesome than the Cuban missile crisis. Luckily American dollars in the nineteenth century did good acquisitive work, which would normally have been the task of the military. In 1803 they bought Louisiana from the French, Florida from Spain (for $5 million) and Alaska from the Russians (for $700,000).

  Inuit had hunted around Prince of Wales since pre-historic times – the Yupik tribe in the south and the Inupiat in the north. A Royal Navy officer who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company was sent to find copper in 1770 and commented approvingly: ‘the women were made for labour; one of them can carry or haul as much as two men do. They also pitch our tents and keep us warm at night . . . Though they can do everything, they are mainta
ined at a trifling expense for, as they always cook, the very licking of their fingers in scarce times is sufficient for their subsistence.’ A US government school was set up at Prince of Wales, but the first teacher was murdered there in 1893. In 1900 up to half the community died in a measles and flu epidemic, and an American visitor in 1901, describing Prince of Wales, wrote: ‘There is probably no place in the world where the weather is so persistently vile as on this cheerless portion of the earth’s surface.’

  On arrival at Wales I could see the writer’s point, although by 1998 there was the landing strip, a public laundry house, a post office, a grocery store, a schoolhouse and the reasonably neat houses of the 150 Inuit inhabitants. I had flown out with the ex-RAF officer, Andrew ‘Mac’ Mackenney whose place on the team had gone to the New Zealander. As first reserve, I had asked Mac to become our base camp leader, stores supervisor and, as I grew to trust and like him, chief administrator for Transglobal’s Europe sector.

  Our rented quarters at Prince of Wales consisted of a large garage with work benches and space enough for both vehicles but not the float. Close by in the same ramshackle building were tiny bedrooms and a cosy kitchen which we shared with Big Dan Richards, the building’s owner, a bearded ex-USAF technician with the air of a genial giant hippie. Dan had married a local Inuit lady, left the Air Force and settled down in the village to raise a family. His hobbies included solving complex computer video puzzles and hunting game on a skidoo in the wilderness that stretched east from the village and over a coastal arm of the Rockies to the nearest town of Teller. Dan operated a radio telephone, so I was able to speak daily to Ginny.