The Ranulph Fiennes Collection: Captain Scott; Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know & Mad, Dogs and Englishmen by Ranulph Fiennes

Author:Ranulph Fiennes [Fiennes, Ranulph]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781444777536
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2013-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

Amid all this Hammer-inspired rushing about, Oliver Shepard called me one day in 1985 with a proposal for the ultimate polar journey, the grail of the international polar fraternity: to reach the North Pole with no outside support and no air contact. No one had yet achieved it. I found myself reacting with unexpected enthusiasm and realised that, ever since the end of the Transglobe travels, I had without knowing it been yearning to return to the cold white unknown. There is a Danish word, polarhullar, an ache for the polar regions, that grips the soul of a traveller so that nowhere else will ever again satisfy his or her appetite for the essence of ‘over there and beyond’. A victim of polarhullar will forever be drawn back to the very extremities of earth.

Part of my annually renewed contract with Dr Hammer allowed me to go off on expeditions for three months in any year. After the success of Transglobe, sponsorship had become much easier to obtain. Equipment, food, travel and insurance could all be quickly lined up free of charge in return for promises of publicity. To obtain the interest of a major newspaper or television film producer was, however, still no easy business.

I failed to find a documentary film-maker but, since such films are statistically watched only by a maximum of two million TV viewers, I concentrated on the main TV News channels which were watched twice daily by over sixteen million. I had once worked as a TV News reporter for ITN in Oman and so approached them first. This began a great working relationship with their reporter Terry Lloyd who ITN agreed to send north with us that year to the base we would make on Ward Hunt Island in the Canadian Arctic.

In the winter of 1985 Ginny was due to lecture about her Very Low Frequency work in Antarctica to a conference in Chicago. At little extra cost she flew on to Resolute Bay in the North West Territories and hitched a lift on to Ward Hunt Island, a remote former scientific summer camp, in a Twin Otter ski-plane that was positioning sonar buoys in the Arctic pack. Ginny measured the skeletal ribs of one of the long abandoned Ward Hunt huts and a sponsor back home constructed a tough new custom-made hut cover. But after reconnoitring the place for us, Ginny would sadly no longer be our base leader.

Back in England, and thanks to my salary from Dr Hammer, we had found our dream home, a near derelict farm in the wilds of Exmoor. There was no electricity but Ginny had started to build up an organic beef herd around an initial six Aberdeen Angus cows. She was also breeding from Bothie’s girlfriend Blackdog, the stray Inuit puppy who had come back with us from Tuktoyaktuk and who Ginny had mated to a Crufts champion black labrador. In 1985 Ginny recommended one of our Transglobe team, Laurence Howell, known as Flo, to take her place in the Arctic as our base leader and radio operator.

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