Doing It the Hard Way

By Marguerite Johnson

Around the world on snowmobiles, ice floes and ingenuity

Prince Charles called the idea "mad but marvelous" when the explorers first set off. Last week, when Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 38, and Charles Burton, 40, returned to England after a threeyear, 35,000-mile trip around the world via the North and South Poles, the Prince hailed their "courage, endurance, will power and sheer bloodymindedness." To the cheers of the 10,000 people who thronged the dockside as their ship, the Benjamin Bowring, sailed up the Thames to Greenwich, Fiennes responded, "Some people would say that we have been lucky, but I would say God has been good to us."

To be sure, Fiennes and Burton had benefited from the largesse of scores of corporations and from technological support that did not exist when Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, became the first man to travel to the South Pole in 1911. In addition to the Benjamin Bowring, the Transglobe Expedition had at its disposal everything from Land Rovers to a Boston Whaler, from short-wave radios to a satellite navigation system. But it did not take long for the team to discover the limits of these aids. As Fiennes told TIME last week, "If you set out and plan your journey into those parts of the world relying on technology, you will end up far worse than the people 100 years ago, who knew they had to rely on what they could cache and what they could bring in with them, no matter what." Much of the equipment failed at one time or another, and some was lost in mishaps, including a fire at the North Pole that destroyed the satellite navigator. Crossing six-foot-high ice ridges in the Antarctic, said Fiennes, "we broke springs, we broke bogie wheels, you name it, it got broken." And when the thermometer fell to -54DEG F near the South Pole, the best clothes from eight countries could not keep the explorers warm.

The all-volunteer effort was in the planning for seven years after Fiennes' wife Virginia first proposed it to her husband, whose previous ventures had included a Hovercraft expedition on the White Nile. Fiennes met Burton, a former army corporal, at a party, and he agreed to go along on a training mission to the Arctic in 1977. An advertisement for a deck hand turned up Anthony Bowring, a seaman, who tracked down a 27-year-old polar ship. Bowring then persuaded his father's insurance firm, C.T. Bowring, and a New York insurance company to buy the ship and help sponsor the expedition. It was renamed for the founder of the firm. Within a year, Bowring had also lined up a professional crew of 14.

Setting out from England on Sept. 2, 1979, the Transglobe Expedition tried to follow the Greenwich meridian, the imaginary line that marks 0DEG longitude. Fiennes and Burton, who were joined by a third explorer, Oliver Shepard, 37, for the first half of the journey, crossed the Sahara by Land Rover before meeting their ship in the Ivory Coast. In Antarctica, the three men proceeded to cross the continent, including more than 1,000 miles of previously uncharted icecap, by snowmobile in a record 66 days. After reaching the South Pole, the team ascended and descended the 9,750-ft. Scott Glacier. Said Burton: "Nobody who wasn't there, who has not felt the deadly lurch of snow giving way, hasn't seen the endless white or blue telltale shadows of a major crevasse field and been forced to continue going through more for hour after hour, can imagine the sweaty apprehension we experienced for those three days."

After a year in the Antarctic, during which they performed scientific experiments for various organizations and ran a charter boat service to the South Pacific (several team members, including Burton, also got married), Transglobe proceeded by ship toward its next destination, the North Pole. Fiennes and Burton navigated the Yukon River by motorized rubber raft, sailed 3,000 miles along the Northwest Passage in the whaler and camped for the four-month Arctic night at Ellesmere Island. They reached the North Pole by snowmobile just before midnight last April 10 and celebrated with well-chilled champagne and a chocolate Easter egg.

On the journey south to rendezvous with the Benjamin Bowring, the expedition almost met with disaster. The ice pack had begun to break up, and the two explorers were forced to wait on an ice floe for 99 days. Despite a series of mishaps and a few brushes with polar bears, they were able to survive until the ship pushed to within seven miles of them. Said Fiennes:

"I find the Arctic Ocean more frightening than any other region I have traveled through, certainly more hostile than Antarctica." In spite of their success, neither Fiennes nor Burton is anxious to set out again for parts unknown any time soon. "This three-year odyssey has exorcised my wanderlust with a vengeance," said Fiennes. "I have had more than enough." The Transglobe's return to England capped a weekend marked by maritime achievement. Bill Dunlop, 41, a former truck driver from Maine, sailed his 9-ft. 7/8-in. sailboat, Wind's Will, into Falmouth after a 78-day voyage across the Atlantic. Dunlop broke a record set only two weeks before for an Atlantic crossing in the smallest boat. Ashby Harper, 65, an Albuquerque headmaster, became the oldest person to swim the English Channel. "I think my swim shows that there are plenty of things people can do when they are over 65," said Harper, who made the 30-mile swim in 13 hr. 52 min. As it turned out, Harper shared the chilly waters with Cindy Nicholas, 24, a Canadian lawyer who set a world record for the fastest two-way crossing: 18 hr. 55 min.

--By Marguerite Johnson.

Reported by Thomas Levenson/London

With reporting by Thomas Levenson

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