"There was all manner of filth floating on top of that water; morsels of rice from the dirty pot, strands of hair from the guerba [waterbag], fragments of dung from the bottom of some well. But the water itself was clear, and I could sense the coolness of it even as its level tipped in the cooking pot before touching my lips. It was the most wonderful thing that had happened to me in my life."
After he wrote The Fearful Void, he told an English interviewer for the Guardian, "Doing this journey was a piece of propaganda in a way. It seems to me that every writer's a propagandist, in that he's trying to advance a point of view he believes; and my own point of view is that we're all essentially like each other. We all suffer the same things, we all laugh at the same things, and we all have to recognize this interdependence."
Valerian Albanov: In the Land of White Death (1917)
THE BOOK TELLS of the three-month ordeal in 1914 of Albanov and thirteen crewmen, who left the ice-bound ship Saint Anna in Franz Josef Land in the Arctic and traveled 235 miles, sledging across snow and ice and open water (in homemade kayaks). This is essentially Albanov's diary of the terrible journey. Frostbite, desertion, sudden death, attacks by walruses and polar bears (they shot forty-seven bears), near drownings, and hallucinations: "Aromas of tropical fruit fill the air with their fragrance. Peaches, oranges, apricots, raisins, cloves, and pepper all give off their wonderful scents."
Later: "We have not washed now for two months. Catching a chance glimpse of my face in the sextant's mirror the other day gave me a terrible fright. I am so disfigured that I am unrecognizable, covered as I am with a thick layer of filth. And we all look like this. We have tried to rub off some of this dirt, but without much success. As a result we look even more frightening, almost as if we were tattooed! Our underclothes and outer garments are unspeakable. And since these underclothes are swarming with 'game' [lice], I am sure that if we put one of our infested jerseys on the ground, it would crawl away all by itself!"
Dougal Robertson: Survive the Savage Sea (1973)
OF THE MANY accounts of sudden sinkings, and survival at sea in a raft, this book stands out as coolly observed, detailed, and eloquent in its stoicism. After a year of sailing, the Lucette, a well-made but fifty-year-old yacht, is rammed by a pod of killer whales just west of the Galápagos Islands. It sinks in a minute, and Captain Robertson has only enough time to launch a dinghy and an inflatable to save himself, his wife, their twin sons, their daughter, and a teenage friend.
This is the beginning of a 37-day, 750-mile voyage, and after the dinghy sinks, they are crammed into the leaky inflatable, living on rations for a short time and then on fish that they catch and the occasional turtle, battling storms and twenty-foot waves and huge ocean swells. The group also endures bickering between husband and wife, the fear and weakness of the children, sharks, sores, boils, heavy rain, and near capsizes. Robertson, who had been a farmer in rural England, is resourceful in fashioning tools and catching fish and turtles. Many pages describe the catching and butchering of turtles on the tiny raft; the drying and preparation of meat; the manner by which rainwater is trapped and kept.
One is convinced, before the book ends, that the Robertsons could have made it to land on their own—they were spotted by a Japanese fishing boat 290 miles off the coast of Costa Rica.
"'Our ordeal is over,' I said quietly. Lyn and the twins were crying with happiness ... I put my arms about Lyn feeling the tears stinging my own eyes. 'We'll get these boys to land after all.' As we shared our happiness and watched the fishing boat close with us, death could have taken me quite easily just then, for I knew that I would never experience another such pinnacle of contentment."
Donn Fendler: Lost on a Mountain in Maine (1939)
HIKING WITH HIS family high on Maine's Mount Katahdin in the summer of 1939, twelve-year-old Donn Fendler became separated from the others, then lost in a low cloud. For the next nine days, until he stumbled upon some campers in a remote cabin, he wandered down the mountain, following the course of a stream. At one point he loses his shoes and has to continue barefoot. On the sixth day he faints in the middle of the day.
The next thing I knew I woke up and it was getting dark.
I was sitting on a rock looking at my feet. They didn't seem to belong to me at first. They were the feet of someone else. The toenails were all broken and bleeding and there were thorns in the middle of the soles. I cried a little as I tried to get out those thorns. They were in deep and broken off. I wondered why they didn't hurt more, but when I felt my toes, I knew—those toes were hard and stiff and hardly any feeling in them. The part next to the big toe was like leather. I tried to pinch it, but I couldn't feel anything.
My head ached and I didn't want to move, but night was falling and I had to go on, at least as far as some big tree. I got to my feet. Was that hard! I could scarcely bend my knees, and my head was so dizzy I staggered. I had to go across an open space to the stream, and as I went along I saw a big bear, just ahead of me. Christmas, he was big—big as a house, I thought—but I wasn't a bit scared—not a single bit. I was glad to see him.
Wilfred Thesiger: Arabian Sands (1959)
THESIGER, WHO DIED in 2003 at the age of ninety-three, is often thought to have been the last real explorer, someone who traveled in remote regions and made significant discoveries—in essence a mapmaker, in the spirit of Richard Burton and H. M. Stanley. Fluent in Arabic, a rider of camels, with a deep sympathy for traditional cultures, Thesiger fought in Ethiopia during World War II and after the war made scientific and personal expeditions in Arabia. He also lived for long periods among the Madan people in the marshes of southern Iraq, an experience he recounts in The Marsh Arabs (1964). That book has great historical value, because the people were displaced by Saddam Hussein in one of his persecutions. Even an average day among the Marsh Arabs seems like an ordeal, but nothing in Thesiger's work compares with his starving in the Empty Quarter of Arabia:
I had almost persuaded myself that I was conditioned to starvation, indifferent to it. After all, I had been hungry for weeks ... Certainly I thought and talked incessantly of food, but as a prisoner talks of freedom, for I realized that the joints of meat, the piles of rice, and the bowls of steaming gravy which tantalized me could have no reality outside my mind...
For the first day my hunger was only a more insistent feeling of familiar emptiness; something which, like a toothache, I could partly overcome by an effort of will. I woke in the gray dawn craving for food, but by lying on my stomach and pressing down I could achieve a semblance of relief...
I faced another night, and the nights were worse than the days. Now I was cold and could not even sleep except in snatches...
In the morning I watched Mikhail turn the camels out to graze, and as they shuffled off, spared for a while from the toil which we imposed upon them, I found I could only think of them as food. I was glad when they were out of sight ... I lay with my eyes shut, insisting to myself, "If I were in London I would give anything to be here"...No, I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless, and dependent upon cars to take me through Arabia. I clung desperately to this conviction. It seemed infinitely important. Even to doubt it was to admit defeat, to forswear everything to which I held.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard: The Worst Journey in the World (1922)
CHERRY-GARRARD WAS ONLY twenty-three when he joined Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition in 1912. Scott and four of his men died on the way back from the pole. But before that, in the winter of 1912-13, Cherry-Garrard trudged through the polar darkness and cold (minus 79°F) to find a rookery of emperor penguins. This was "the Worst Journey." After returning to Britain Cherry-Garrard fought in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, where almost a million men died. But he said, "The Somme was a relative picnic compared to the Antarctic." He also said, "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion."