Sublime

I was fuelled by a kind of ‘feral fortitude’.

the Hercules’s lifeboats. Our American mole had reported that the ship they used is much faster than we were led to believe. He should call me soon to tell me how it went, but

Dall’s report on the Black Current was unequivocal. “The Kuro Siwo sends no recognizable branch northward, between the Aleutians and Kamchatka,” he wrote. “No warm current from Bering Sea enters Bering Strait. The strait is incapable of carrying a current of warm water of sufficient magnitude to have any marked effect on the condition of the Polar

we sighted the most westerly point of South America that forms Cape San Roque. But then the Nautilus swerved again, and sought the lowest depth of a submarine valley which is between this Cape and Sierra Leone on the African coast.

While still nursing their wounds they were given lessons in field-craft by David Stirling (who went on to found the SAS) and Lord Lovat (who was to become captain of the Lovat Scouts).

All this had been discussed and discussed again. And though the Caird’s chances of actually reaching South Georgia were remote, a great many men genuinely wanted to be taken along. The prospect of staying behind, of waiting and not knowing, of possibly wintering on this hateful island was far from attractive. Shackleton had already made up his

Maurice Wilson, Earl Denman, Klavs Becker-Larsen—none of them knew much about mountain climbing or they would not have set out on their hopeless quests, yet, untrammelled by techniques, determination carried them a long way. Walt Unsworth Everest

This is preserved in a remarkable English document that records the conversations between Alfred, the king of Wessex, and a visitor to his court in the 880s, as mentioned above in the prologue. Named there as ‘Ohthere’, he was almost certainly called Óttarr in his own language and seems to have come from the region around the Lofoten islands in

In March 1978, Waterman embarked on his most astonishing expedition, a solo ascent of Mt. Hunter’s southeast spur, an unclimbed route that had previously defeated three teams of elite mountaineers.