“We decided that if we went anywhere else, it would have to be warm,” Alun told me when I met him and Christopher one evening in London. They took me to Paddy’s old club, the Travelers, and showed me the map over the fireplace of Paddy’s walk across Europe as a teenager, signed with Paddy’s trademark doodle of a flock of flying birds. Tracking Paddy across Crete, they said, turned out to be more than they’d reckoned on. “You look at the maps that are available. They’re not accurate at all,” Christopher said. “And even if you’re shown where to go, it’s quite hard to find your way. We went looking for a particular cave and were told we were right in front of it. For the life of us, we couldn’t find it.”
They also learned to tread lightly around the Cretans: xenía still ruled, except when loyalty was at stake. “When the police went to arrest someone in Anogia while we were there, they were stopped on the edge of town by machine-gun fire and had to turn back,” Christopher Paul said. The entire village was ready to go to war—including the clergy—if the police tried arresting a local boy. “We met a Greek priest with a Glock under his cassock,” Christopher added. “He pulled it out of his sock.”
Alun and Christopher had battled through plenty of rough stuff before, but they’d never dealt with the rocks that ripped the boots off one of their teammate’s feet in their first six hours on the ground. They arrived lean, fit, and well-provisioned (unlike Paddy and Xan, who survived on local forage), but still found themselves burning weight to the tune of nearly twenty pounds in two weeks. “Anytime you’re on an expedition like this, the unexpected will find you,” Alun advised. “That’s the question that’s always intrigued me: How strong does your character have to be to deal with disaster?”
Fortunately, I had two advantages before seeing what Chris and I would find—or what would find us—on Paddy’s route: I had a six-month head start, and access to my own Hero School.
The school I had in mind was born, as Alun Davies would have expected, from one man’s reaction to a nightmare. During the first week of May 1902, a twenty-seven-year-old French naval officer named Georges Hébert was stationed on the warship Suchet off the coast of Martinique, “the Paris of the Caribbean.” For days, Martinique’s Mount Pelée had been spraying up bursts of sparks, but no one was really concerned. The volcano had been dormant for more than a century, and both the island’s governor and the mayor of the capital city, Saint-Pierre, insisted there was nothing to worry about. Posters were nailed up all over Saint-Pierre encouraging everyone to rest easy and enjoy the free fireworks. Even when the sparks were joined by a plume of dark smoke and the stench of sulfur, Martinique remained unevacuated and largely unconcerned.
By May 7, everything was calm again. “The sun was now shining out nice and bright,” steamship captain Ellery Scott noted in his ship’s journal, “and everything appeared to be pleasant and favorable.” So pleasant, in fact, that there were plenty of seats available on the last steam ferry of the day; it left the island barely one-third full. The sparks had died down and the volcano had gone back to sleep….
Until early the following morning, when pent-up gases tore the top off the mountain. Two explosions boomed—one seven miles straight up in the air, the other a cannon of burning gas and fiery rock pointed right at Saint-Pierre. Sizzling lava gushed down the slope, launching swarms of fleeing vipers and crazed animals. People ran from their homes, only to be pelted by red-hot boulders, choked by ash and smoke, slashed by venomous snakes, and buffeted by 120-mile-per-hour winds. Darkness descended; superheated volcanic gas blanketed the city in a dark cloud broken only by flames and blasts of lightning. Rain fell, scalding hot. Screams, explosions, earth-shaking crashes, a riot of agony and panic …
And into this nightmare plunged Georges Hébert. The Suchet tried to approach port on a rescue mission, but blistering heat and furious winds churned the sea and threatened to crash the ship into the rocks. Hébert helped lower a launch and set off with a small band of seamen. While everyone else in Saint-Pierre was running away from the horror, Hébert and his crew were fighting their way toward it. They’d be among the very few who looked straight at the nightmare and lived to remember. For hours, Hébert and his crew fought to stay afloat while pulling scorched survivors from the water and rowing them to safety on the Suchet. More than thirty thousand people were in the city. More than twenty-nine thousand died.
“One of the greatest calamities in history has fallen upon our neighboring island of Martinique,” President Theodore Roosevelt would lament. Beyond the body count, the tragedy had a morbid fascination: it seemed so puzzlingly avoidable. How much warning do people need to outrun a volcano? Have our survival instincts decayed so badly that even when fire flares into the sky, we don’t pay attention? But one question in particular needled Georges Hébert: how many people were betrayed by their own bodies? They weren’t killed—they died, frozen and uncertain, when they could have been running, crawling, jumping, and swimming for their lives.
Years later, a young British writer would reflect on Martinique in the same way. Paddy Leigh Fermor was so fascinated by the eruption, he made it the subject of his first and only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques. In Paddy’s depiction, Martinique has two types of survivors: a few dumb-but-lucky Europeans, and canny natives saved by their own strength and skill. “They were the descendants of the cannibal savages that inhabited the archipelago long before the whites or blacks arrived,” Paddy writes. “Some unconscious or atavistic wisdom had prompted them to escape, just as it had prompted the iguanas and snakes and armadillos, while the black and the white intruders had received, or at least, had taken, no hint of the disasters ahead. These primitive men had an inborn knack of survival when dealing with their ancestral problems which was lacking in everybody else.”
The Caribs’ “inborn knack” was really nothing special; it was just the same familiarity with their bodies and the natural world that humans have relied on for most of our existence. The Caribs were quick enough to get to the water and strong enough to stay afloat when their dugout canoes were capsized by scorching chunks of flying rock. The Caribs are what Homer had in mind when he created Odysseus, his ultimate unsinkable hero: not superstrong, just smart and sinewy enough to adapt to any jam. “Once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces,” Odysseus declares, “then I will swim.”
Can that inborn knack be reborn? Georges Hébert chewed the problem over during the journey home to France. He was greeted as a hero, but he felt his real rescue operation had yet to begin. We’ve been living a lethal fantasy, Hébert realized. We’ve lulled ourselves into believing that in an emergency, someone else will always come along to rescue us. We’ve stopped relying on our own wonderfully adaptable bodies; we’ve forgotten that we can think, climb, leap, run, throw, swim, and fight with more versatility than any other creature on the planet. But how many of his fellow Parisians, Hébert wondered, could pull themselves up on a ledge, leap a three-foot chasm, carry a child to safety? Could he? He couldn’t remember the last time he saw any grown-up crawl, climb a tree, somersault to cushion a fall, or even sprint.