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>>Ranulph Fiennes: A very good morning to you. I've got 20 minutes to do what normally
takes 55 minutes so I'll talk quite quickly. I'm sorry about that.
I was in the British Army there for five years in Germany in the Cold War, and all we learned
was how to retreat from the German border in tanks.
So I got bored and joined the Sultan's Army at a time when world Marxism was doing very
well, and so I joined the Army. This is the Sultan's Navy back then. That's his Army.
This was my reconnaissance platoon. There were about 60 of us. I had learned Arabic
in Beaconsfield, and so we were able to communicate. This is the Sultan's Air Force, or one-half
of it, photographed obviously from the other half.
If you look carefully, the team consisted of people from Oman, Zanzibar, Balochistan,
and myself, European. All of us were, of course, Muslim. I was a Muslim for the three years
I was out there. There were about 3,000 members of the people's
front on the opposition. There were only 180 of us in the Army. So I learned to be flexible
by never moving in an easy target like a Land Rover, so we only moved by night for three
years out there. But I had to leave the Sultan's Army, unfortunately.
We, over the three years, were the only Army patrol on the total Saudi, Yemeni, Omani border.
It was a great time, but if you went too many times on the same track, they would put mines
which would blow a Land Rover over a hundred meters and the people further than that. So
you learned to be alert. I was thrown out of the British Army because
I had failed to get A-levels at school, so I couldn't go to Sandhurst, like the American
West Point, and so when I was thrown out of the Army purely because of the lack of A-levels,
I was 24 years old and my career was behind me.
So I got married at the time, and my wife decided what we could do to make a living
was to do what I'd been doing in the Army, teaching soldiers how to climb and ski in
Germany, in order to stop them beating each other up in the canteen, which they did because
they were very bored because the Soviet Army never bothered to attack.
Now, the -- that was paid for by the taxpayer in the Army, but now, my wife and I had to
start a new career with nothing, no money whatsoever.
So we started to think "Let's do big projects, beyond anything other people had done."
So back in 1968, we did the first ever journey up the longest river in the world, which is
the Nile at 4,000 miles. We decided to use a new thing called a hovercraft. They were
two-seaters. They could lift three centimeters above the surface. We took nine months to
complete the Nile because there were a lot of four-centimeter obstacles.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: We moved to all sorts of
different projects, maybe 12 big expeditions all over the world.
This one was at the invitation of the British Colombian government, which is -- they had
a centennial. They had only been a Canadian province for 100 years, so they asked us,
as a Scottish unit, because of all the explorers who discovered it had been Scots, to do the
first-ever journey from their Yukon border 3 1/2 thousand miles down the Rocky Mountain
rivers, the roughest in the world, to the United States border at Vancouver.
We took quite a long time to do that. I used people from the Army that had three weeks
leave. We took eight months, so they were not popular when they got back.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: This particular rapid,
Hell's Gate, some of you may know it if you come from Canada. We had four boats, three
people in each boat. That one went the wrong way and got turned over and we found their
bodies three miles downstream, which could have stopped the entire expedition, but luckily
that was just the BBC film crew. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: Round about I think 1975, we had a problem, because in our industry,
if you call it that, fashion changed, and whatever you're in, you got to respond quickly.
And my boss, my literary agent in New York, decided that we must stop doing hot expeditions
because the fashion was to do only cold polar ones.
So my wife decided we must start ambitiously in the polar world by doing the first ever
journey vertically around Earth's surface without flying one meter of the 52,000 miles.
So I was sent to a library by her to find the best route, and I quickly discovered that
at the bottom there was a place called Antarctic, far bigger than China and India stuffed together,
but with no Tescos on route. Now, nobody had ever crossed it from side
to side. I'm talking about the world's experts. So we had only spent a winter in Scotland,
so we didn't stand much chance. Up at the top, I found there was another obstacle
called the Arctic Ocean, 2,000 miles of it, which also had never been crossed by experts.
So I went home, as you would, and I told my wife it was a stupid idea. She became quite
unpleasant, so I therefore went back to the library.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: You have -- you have to
be first. If you're second, you won't get sponsorship and we depend upon sponsorship.
We knew that the great American explorer at that time, Walt Pederson, was after being
first to both poles -- didn't want to go the whole way around -- so we were in a hurry.
But we worked every day, every week, for seven years unpaid in order to raise 1900 sponsors
from all over the world, including a 40-year-old ship. We found a team of 52 people who gave
up pretty much their lives, as it turned out, for eight years unpaid to join us. We had
to have a ship to drop us off over a three-year period, because that was how long it would
take to do the first and only journey around Earth's polar surface.
We arrived at Antarctic seven years after we started work on it. We were unloaded by
the ship's crew, all volunteers. They said goodbye, went round the other side to the
Pacific below New Zealand to wait, in case our group of three managed to do the first
crossing of Antarctica. The problem was, you can't just arrive there
and cross because it gets dark, it goes down to minus 122 degrees centigrade -- that's
up at 7,000 feet above sea level -- where we would have to spend eight months.
Because we needed a light house -- a light, not heavy one -- my wife designed one in Wales
out of paper, which you could paint to make it harder.
It could withstand minus 30 degrees and winds of 40 miles an hour.
That winter, we had 160-mile-an-hour winds so you might think we would be flattened and
cold. But because the snow was designed to drift up to the roof, giving us insulation
and protection, but then of course you could not get out.
You might think, well, why would you want to?
Well, we were cooking with gasoline in a paper house, so getting out was important.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: We -- eventually, the sun
came back after eight months, the thermometer rose to minus 68, so we left the base leader
-- in those days, no GPS, so Morse code communications, no sat phone. We left the base commander.
That is the nastiest job, so I gave it to my wife Ginny because the whole thing had
been her fault for thinking of it. But she was a little person and could not roll 45-gallon
drums about in the snow so a man had to be living with my wife for three years. So I
did not want somebody who was physically attractive in that position, but luckily, we found a
Yorkshireman for that particular job. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We did the first-ever crossing of 900 miles. No human being had been there
before. Nobody knew how high it was. There were no polar orbiting satellites. We mapped
an area bigger than France, probably the last time a terrestrial map was made before polar
satellites made that sort of thing redundant. We eventually reached the other side of the
world. You know you're there because there's only one active volcano on the Pacific coast.
From that point, we then carried on. Ginny's plan, made nine years before off a map in
London, was to -- the ship would collect us, which it did. Two other ships were sunk in
the ice down there, but ours got through. The people were still on board, still unpaid.
Two of them were dead but the rest were still there. They moved up the Greenwich Meridian,
past, as you can see on the map, Australia, Los Angeles, Vancouver, through the Baring
Straits, which are just up there. That is the Greenwich Meridian which was what
we were more or less following. 500 miles north of Alaska up in the ocean is the North
Pole and all the ice, 3 million-ton ice floes move at 3 miles an hour, and when they hit,
they will sink your ship. Therefore, when she made the plan, she decided the ship would
drop the three of us in the land group off in rubber boats at the mouth of the Yukon
river. We would then go 1200 miles up the Yukon on the McKenzie River going north for
800 miles, and then we would switch from the rubber boats -- by now there are only two
of us, not three -- into a 15-foot Boston whaler which was open to go through the Northwest
Passage. It was the first time any human being had
been through the Northwest Passage in a single season.
From the North Pole, all this ice comes down, even in midsummer, against the north Canadian
coast, which is where the passage is. We were very lucky. We managed to get through
it. Seven days and nights with no stopping. But the boat at that point froze in. The sea
froze. So boats become useless. So we had 400 miles still to go, which had
he hadn't planned for, so you have to be flexible. We had skis with us, so on the second day,
unfortunately, the other bloke, Charlie Burton, a South African guy, his skis broke, which
is extremely irritating, which I told him, which was not --
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: -- not a good idea, because
mine broke shortly after that. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: You must always have belt and braces. If your skis break, you've got
to have snowshoes. Unfortunately, he got fungus. The skin fell off one of his feet. He then
got hemorrhoids. He then fell over and cracked his head on a crack and his eyes filled up
with blood and he started to complain. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: He basically -- we then spent eight months up in the north waiting
for the dark period to go. One month before the sun came back at that latitude, we said
goodbye to Ginny and the two huts, and a week after we left, one of them where all the parachutes
were stored for the eight-month attempt to cross the Arctic by the North Pole caught
fire. She tried to put the fire out and did a bad job, as you can see, sent a Morse code
message. We were 200 miles away out on the ice by then in the dark. All the pictures
I took in the dark came out black, so there's no point showing them.
But that is what it did look like in the darkness. You can see steam there. Basically, that is
minus 60. You do not expect open water, but there's so much movement from the current
and the wind, that it's a nasty place to be in the dark, because you can tread on sludge
and then it goes over your head. That was a nasty bit, but we did reach the
North Pole and became the first human beings in history to reach both poles. We put a flag
there, because people do, but it's pretty stupid because within one hour, that flag
is half a mile from the pole because the ice is sort of floating.
If you go there and you want to put your flag there, dig a hole in the ice, swim down 17,000
feet to the seabed, put your flag there, and it will stay put.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: We did not do that.
At that particular point, we knew that we wanted to go to Greenwich which was south
on the campus, but unfortunately so was every other potential destination in the world.
So this caused hostility between the two of us at that point.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: We only got 400 miles before
the annual breakup. It's like a tsunami. It's very noisy. It's not good for imagination.
That's why we have ex-military people who don't have imagination. We sat on an ice floe
which got smaller under breakage for three months floating toward Siberia. We never got
bored because Charlie, over on the left there, had a solar panel which gave us enough power
to listen to the BBC world service for two minutes every day if there was reception.
And one particular day with his headsets on Charlie said, "The United Kingdom is at war."
I said, "Who with?" And he said, "I didn't get that bit."
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: We sat for five days of
bad radio reception arguing who the hell it could be. We knew that Mrs. Thatcher was aggressive,
but we couldn't work out who with. We assumed it was France but we had no proof.
[ Laughter ] [ Applause ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: When they said it was Argentina, we thought that was just a stupid BBC joke.
We also did not get so bored because we got visited over the three months. They weight
one and a half tons. Up there, they are very hungry because they kill near land. They will
go for you. You smell of hot blood, and when you are attacked in that area by a bear, the
best thing you can do, really, is shoot it. If you do that, you will be put in prison
immediately by the Canadian police. Or you would if there were any up there.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: The rules before you leave
Canada, you do not open fire unless they attack you from ten meters. That's going to be too
late for you. Even then, you are not allowed to shoot unless their body language is aggressive.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: How do you know? On page
80 it explains that an aggressive bear's tail will always be at 45 degrees to the ground.
But when they attack you you cannot see their tail. They also explained that only 10% eat
humans but you can't ask them which percentage they belong to.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: We had -- Eight years before
we designed canoes with skis in case this happened. Our floe was deteriorating. The
ship came up from Europe to try and rescue us. They got stuck, and began to sink.
Two months later, by which time we were really panicking, they got stuck only 18 miles away
so we managed to reach them. I don't know if you can see but if you look
carefully just over there, that's us. When we arrived on the ship after eight months
out on the floating ice, humans had been around Earth's surface for the first time in history
by any route. Nobody has ever done it again. Only two people have ever been around Earth's
surface. More people have actually been on the moon.
We kept our team together and throughout the 1980s and '90s, using aerospace technology,
we beat all our rivals, including the Norwegians, to the world records north and south. We used
amphibious equipment which weighed nothing apart from a paddle to go through Shugo (phonetic),
which had previously been impossible. We used political lateral thought because Gorbachev
in 1992 said glasnost. I wrote, "Dear Mr. Gorbachev, Can I do the first expedition from
Siberia," not from North America, from Cape Arktikisky. It's the best place to set out
from, but it was a missile site, secret missile site, so I had to sign a contract that whilst
there I would take no photos. I did not. The other members of the team did.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: We broke the world records
from Russia for the next nine years, but unfortunately, over in Arabia, over that period I had spent
eight big expeditions in vehicles looking for the lost city in the greatest desert in
the world, the Rub' al Khali Empty Quarter, and I was just about to find it in 1992 when,
unfortunately, NASA, that's Pasadena, California, the jet propulsion laboratory, they put cameras
on the shuttle, and from 170 kilometers in space they take pictures. That is the Empty
Quarter desert. Between each brown line of dunes you've got 50 miles. That's 80 kilometers.
That is a NASA professor. If you look at that map and you are looking for lost cities like
I was but without the shuttle, you can identify a lost city 30 feet under the sand. It becomes
obvious by looking at a NASA photograph with bioptics. It's a system -- well, it's really
cheating. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: They identified the lost city out there because it was all right angles,
and they assumed that people make things with right angles. But actually, when my archeologist
got out there where we found the lost city, he said this is not made by man. It's made
by God using right angles in order to fool NASA.
So we -- Just to finish up with, I'm going to mention an expedition in the mid '90s.
We were doing it because we heard that our main rivals from Norway were about to do it
so we switched what we were doing and planned to do the first unsupported crossing of Antarctica.
Those were the four expeditions by then that had crossed Antarctica, including the blue
line which was our transglobe expedition. The red line was the American Steiger.
The yellow line was the world's greatest climber, Reinhold Messner from Italy, together with
Germany's top man, Arved Fuchs. And lastly, the green line was in the 1950s led by Sir
Edmund Hillary, who previously climbed Everest, and Dr. Fuchs, the top European polar man.
But all four of us had used air support. Now in the '90s we're talking about doing
it without any form of support at all. There are crevasses. That was the Hillary-Fuchs
expedition. Some of them are 300 feet deep. You don't want to fall into them if you want
the expedition to succeed. We arrived our team at the start point. That
is where the Atlantic ocean hits Antarctica's coast. The ski plane dropped us off and said
goodbye. They'd see us again in 2,000 miles time. Everything you carry on day one must
last you for 2,000 miles. We towed 500 pounds each. That's a thousand pounds between two
people. The other guy with me is Europe's top physiologist. He specializes in studying
the effects of starvation on the human body and muscle cannibalization. So he was in his
element in this expedition. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: He monitored our output as eight and a half thousand calories every
day for 97 days with no rest day. We could only carry 5,000, so we had a daily deficiency
for 97 days of three and a half thousand calories. I set out at 15 and a half stone. By the halfway
I was under nine stone. We were skeletal. This is even Weight Watchers with not recommend
this method. Our feet were not good because towing that
weight effects your toes. Your lips also are damaged because of the ozone hole which is
right ahead. At fortnight, all the scabs, when you go to sleep, stick together. You
wake up in the morning, you must say good morning to the other bloke. It's called team
dynamics. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: But you cannot, because your lips are all scabbed together so you
prod it. And then you're sharing porridge out of a communal bowl out of breakfast so
all your blood goes in his porridge which causes bad relations.
Navigation, you don't need to be very clever to work out the time on that man's watch.
Okay? He is heading for the South Pole. He is treading on his shadow. The sun is due
north at midday, so it's got to be midday on his watch.
So an hour later, this is how we navigated, I am going to say there is my shadow. It's
1 o'clock. The sun moves 15 degrees an hour, so I am going to go 15 degrees to the right
of the shadow; 2 o'clock, 30 degrees. And that was how you navigated until 1995 when
the first polar orbiting satellites arrived and GPS was possible.
Crevasses, you have well over 8,000 to cross. You can't see them because they are covered
with snow normally until you have gone into them by which time the information is too
late. So I therefore developed a very careful policy,
which was to watch the bloke ahead. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: Nobody is going to fall into that one. There is a big hole up there
that you can see. You can just see somebody up there.
We reached the pole at which point our Norwegian competitors fell out, pretty much dead.
The only reason we carried on the other half of the expedition was because my colleague
had a contract with Lancet Magazine, Europe's top medical magazine, about advanced starvation.
And at the pole he'd measured our weight and found that we were starving even more than
he had hoped and he was determined to complete the article even if it was posthumous, so
we carried on. I began to hate him.
[ Laughter ] >>Ranulph Fiennes: I'd done six expeditions
with him before. The most difficult polar expedition of all time which we're planning
at the moment will also be with him. But I did hate him. Every five days he took your
blood for science. Didn't have much blood left. Every eight days he made you drink a
container of liquid costing a thousand dollars which, for 24 hours after you drink it, any
liquid coming out of your body must be collected for science, especially urine.
Now, at minus 90 average, peeing into a pee bottle at minus 90 is lethal for that part
of your body if you are male, although, obviously, at that sort of temperature, the difference
between males and females is not great. [ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: His hands became very bad. The blisters on top of your ski sticks in
the mitts get ice balls, so if you arrive at the tent at night and shake your hand,
it sounds like castanets. Then the blisters will fall off leaving raw
skin. That's my hand about five years ago. That was a result of me making a mistake for
about three minutes in 39 years. You need to retain your focus totally at all times
on these trips. We did eventually reach the other side of
Antarctica. That is the Pacific ocean. We were pretty much dead by then but we got there,
and had gone that little bit beyond which any of our previous people had done. It became
and is today the longest polar unsupported journey in history. And we went on to many
more expeditions. But after 40 years of staying ahead of our
rivals, I would say that the one thing you have to remember at all times is you will
not get sponsorship on which we depend without staying ahead of your rivals at all times.
Thank you. [ Applause ]