Exercises

Visions on Ice    

Walley Herbert is the greatest pioneering polar explorer alive today. Here is a man who led the British Trans-Arctic Expedition, a 16-month, pioneering journey of 3 800 miles, much of it in the pitch darkness, over a moving ice ocean that was constantly shifting and breaking up, with three men and a team of four dogs. This journey, it is now universally agreed, was the "last great journey left on the face of the earth." A journey that no one since has even dared attempt. This was a geographical first that ranked alongside climbing Everest and the first surface crossing of the Southern and Northern icecaps of the Earth.

Thirty years on from this journey Walley Herbert is the last link between the explorers from the heroic age of exploration and our modern day adventures. Yet he has never been honored for his outstanding achievement in Polar exploration. This is despite the fact that Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed the Trans-Arctic journey as "a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history", Shackleton called it a "phenomenon" and HRH Prince Philip, the expedition's patron, hailed it as "an achievement which ranks among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance."

Today, among his contemporaries in polar exploration Herbert is a guru and Sir Ranulph Fiennes says: "I've grown up thinking he's the greatest of the polar travelers of today. His navigation, fieldcraft and logistics are superb and his awareness of what dogs can and can't do unparalleled. Wally is very genuine and if I had to pick out of all the travelers who are alive today, Wally is the greatest by a big head." Herbert has helped many a young adventurer on his way, with crucial advice on equipment, mapping and contacts. None of these men have retraced his pioneering journeys in the Antarctic or the Arctic.

To mark the anniversary of Herbert's expedition reaching the North Pole on the 60th anniversary of Robert E Peary's discredited claim to have done so first, an exhibition of Herbert's polar paintings will be showing at the Atlas Studio Gallery in London. For nowadays, Herbert, aged 64, has become a polar painter, etching out the most detailed, intense and moving scenes from polar history and the present that have influenced his life.

At Inverness airport, Wally and his wife Marie are waiting to meet me. I get a good look at him before he does me. He is diminutive, 5 foot 8 inches, not the usual macho image of a great explorer—but he has on a coat designed for the Arctic weather, with a fur-lined hood, framing a grizly beard and small sparkling eyes. His posture is unimposing and his shoulders a little hunched. Marie gives me a warm welcome.

The Herberts have never owned a house of their own and they are presently renting a doll-size white washed "bothy", overlooking the Spey valley. The view of the rolling hills is impressive but the noise from the small, occasionally busy road aggravates Wally. He craves silence.

    "See me in my environment," he urges before we start the interview proper. He shows me a film of his life in the Arctic and past journeys that is currently in post-production. When he is in the Arctic, the shackles and difficulty that he finds with life in Britain are shaken off and he visibly relaxes.

In his environment, Herbert is the Sean Connery of all James Bonds. He is softly spoken, glowing and confident. On film, he reminisces passionately of the fear he felt before setting out on his Trans-Arctic journey. Looking ahead at the journey was psychologically very frightening because while he had traveled in the footsteps of Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen, no one had ever attempted this journey.

Finding the North Pole was "rather like stepping on the shadow of a bird hovering overhead." This was because the ice was constantly moving and the sun only intermittently appearing to let them take their reading. Like Robert E Peary before them had done, they nearly missed it. The story is an amazing one: On 5 April 1969 Herbert messaged Her Majesty the Queen, "I have the honor to inform your Majesty that on the 5th April by dead reckoning we reached the North Pole." However, once the sun had come out he realized that the group had drifted off course and in order to get that all important proof they struggled on. It was not until the next day that they actually reached the North Pole and by amazing coincidence this was the very same day that Pearsy had claimed to have done so too on 6th April 1909.

Herbert places a lot of emphasis on some very strange coincidences which lead him to believe that there is a "soul connection" with explorers of that region and discovery of the world and its environment as a whole. As the expedition headed home they photographed their first siting of land for 16 months. It was precisely the moment that the Astronaut Jack Young took the famous photograph of the "Earthrise" from the moon. Strangely too, at the end of journey they touched land at the exact moment, that 16 years earlier Hillary and Tensing had reached the summit of Mount Everest.

"For me this first sight of land meant so much. The earth was like a precious jewel and that moment changed my life. It was from then that I began searching for the Third Pole." Herbert's spiritual quest has, he says, been as tough and demanding as his physical one.

His childhood was spent with his mother and sister on a ranch in the Drankensberg mountains, in South Africa with his father absent in World War II. Herbert has few memories of this time. "I remember almost nothing until the age of twelve. A physiotherapist would probably tell me that I didn't want to be a child, which is probably true. I was not close to either of my parents or my sister and the moment that my voice broke was a great relief."

One of Herbert's earliest memories is aptly a journey on ice. At the age of twelve, for a bet of five shillings, he walked across the River Severn on extremely thin ice, for which he was promptly beaten by his father. The first man to fire Herbert's imagination was The Reverend Norman Gurney, who had sailed as the boatswain on the Penola, the last expedition which had ventured under sail to the Antarctica in 1932. As a choirboy, Herbert would sit enthralled at the curate's sermons which would be full of tales of Arctic adventure rather than the more conventional biblical stories. This was when Herbert resolved to become a District Officer somewhere in Colonial Africa or failing that, an explorer.

However, his family had other ambitions for their dreaming son. To serve Queen and country was every man's destiny in the Herbert family, as it had been for the past four hundred years. At the age of 17, he was frog-marched to the nearest recruiting office and signed up for 22 years. Luckily for him he discovered a clause in his contract that gave him the option to quit after three years. Meanwhile, he hated every moment. "I am not a team player, I hated doing these pointless things which I felt were an insult to our intelligence. I was brutalized in the army."

When Herbert left the army in 1955 he hitch-hiked home from Egypt, through Turkey, Greece and Italy, drawing portraits for his food and shelter, and as often, sleeping rough. "My father did not speak to me for three years but by the time I returned home from the Antarctic, having hitch-hiked 15 000 miles from Uruguay, he was proud of me and we became friends. He would take me to the pub and being an army man would always march in step with me which I would always purposefully break."

"What I deeply regret is that I never told my father that I wanted to have his scrapbook of sporting and military achievements. When I was doing my Arctic journey he made a huge scrap book with all the international clippings. But when it had grown to two large volumes, he burnt his own book. I was so sad about that." With his mother, he says, "I had little contact. We spoke politely to each other but I felt embarrassed when she was concerned for me. She was very gentle."

So where did he get his sense of mission? Was it driven by ego and arrogance? "My sense of mission was always historical," he explains. "It was not so much the physical prowess and the macho thing, although I have come to recognise the value of ego and arrogance in an explorer because without them I simply would not have attempted any of these journeys. I believed totally that we would succeed and would not have gone if I had thought otherwise. For the first two years I was in the Antarctic I was in awe of many explorers but then I began to have the authority to challenge them."

One day in 1955 he spotted two advertisements in the Telegraph for jobs in the Antarctic. He was selected at the age of 22 to join the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, based at Hope Bay on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Gradually Herbert achieved historic journeys, mapping some 38 000 square miles of previously unexplored country in the Nimrod Glacier region and the Queen Maud Range from 1960-62 and retracing Amundsen's route on the Axel Hiberg Glacier on the fiftieth anniversary of his descent of those icefalls in 1952. Between 1962 and 1963, Herbert worked frantically for a year in New Zealand to draw and publish this map before the Americans did. And then with soaring ambitions he returned to England to gather the support of distinguished polar explorers so that the Royal Geographical Society would approve his expedition to cross the Arctic Ocean. In 1966 he wintered with the Polar Eskimos of North West Greenland in order to learn their ways and techniques on the ice. Herbert set out from Greenland the following spring re-tracing the 1908 outward route of Dr Freerick Cook, a journey of 1 500 miles.

Although the journey across the top of the world roundly was applauded it was badly timed because the eyes of the world were fixed on an event of larger historical significance, man's first landing on the moon. And so Wally Herbert returned from the Arctic with a huge financial debt and sense of failure. Married on Christmas Eve 1969 to Marie, he settled down to write two books but soon he needed another journey. In 1971 he set out with his wife and baby daughter, Kari for north-west Greenland to live with the Polar Eskimos. Then came a period of reflection and inner-struggle as Herbert set out to write Peary's biography and reluctantly disprove his hero's claim to be the first man to the North Pole. "This was the blackest cross-roads of my entire life," he says. But worse was still to come. His youngest daughter Pascale was killed in a freak electrical accident four years ago which the whole family are struggling to come to terms with.

Having diced with death more than most men on earth, he now believes in reincarnation. "When I'm awake I am never, and never have been, afraid of death. I've always been afraid of death through nightmares. For example during my Polar days, if I fell down a crevasse or into the sea through thin ice, I had already done it so many times in my dreams that I knew what to do. So when it happened for real, I had gone through the agony of dying in these situations already and I picked the method in which I lived happily ever after."

(1 990 words)

(From Geographical, May 1999 )

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