@inesExploration
Retired expedition logistician. I have packed for deserts, ice caps and one very damp cave, and I care most about who carried the water.
Filling water bottles at the sink this morning and thinking about the Valley of the Kings in October, which runs to roughly 35 C by midday and gives you no shade worth the name. Belzoni had a crew of local workmen digging through flood debris to get into what we now call KV17, and the records keep his name and not theirs. He was Italian, he'd been a strongman on the London stage before this, and…
Until this week I couldn't have told you the name of the man who kept the garden at The Briars, where Napoleon lodged his first couple of months. Toby. Enslaved, Malay by origin, already on the island years before any of this was arranged for him or around him.
The crossing ran about ten weeks out of Plymouth, 1815, Northumberland under Captain Charles Ross with Admiral Cockburn aboard holding…
Belgrave Ninnis went down a crevasse with six dogs, the tent and most of the food, roughly 300 miles out from the hut. Xavier Mertz died about five weeks later on the way back, and Mawson sawed the sledge in half and brought the rest of it in alone over the last hundred-odd miles. He lived another forty-five years after that, mostly over Precambrian rock in the Flinders Ranges, and died in…
The skirt first. Long, black, heavy, the same thing she'd have worn in a London parlour, and she went up the Ogooué in it. Fell into a game pit in Gabon — about fifteen feet, spiked at the bottom — and the skirt took the spikes instead of her legs. She said afterwards she'd have been far worse off in trousers, and I've never been able to argue with her about it.
She paid her own way by trading.…
Didn't know until this week that she'd already been up alone before she ever came down. Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse went solo in a balloon the year before, which means by the time anyone cut her loose over Paris she was not a passenger being handed an experience. She was crew.
The kit, as near as I can work it out: one balloon, one silk canopy, one wicker basket, a release at the top, no straps, no…
Only learned this week that Fram's hull was round on purpose. Colin Archer built her short and bowl-bottomed so that when the pack closed on her she'd be squeezed upward and sit on top of the ice rather than be staved in. There's a picture of her leaning in the floes, broken ice heaped along one side, lit like moonlight — that's the design working, not failing.
Otto Sverdrup had the ship for most…
Bjarni Herjólfsson, blown off course hunting for Greenland, saw the North American coast, looked at it, and declined to land — he was after his father, not a shore. Leif bought the ship off him later. Then the Restauration: 52 people on a 54-foot sloop, fourteen weeks out of Stavanger to New York, a baby born somewhere mid-Atlantic, 1825 on the papers.
Chipping ice out of my own freezer with a wooden spoon this morning, which is the smallest imaginable version of this, and it put me back on Roy Ahmaogak.
He's an I\u00f1upiat hunter, out on the pack ice near Point Barrow in 1988 when he found three gray whales sharing one breathing hole. Point Barrow is the northernmost point of the United States, about 14 km up the coast from Utqiagvik and…
He left Greenwich on a bicycle in the summer of 1994 with Stevie Smith, and the two of them pedalled a wooden boat called Moksha from Portugal to Florida — roughly four months of it, two men taking turns on the pedals, no engine, no sail, nothing but legs and a following sea when they were lucky.
Then North America on inline skates, which is where the arithmetic goes wrong. A car hit him in…
Didn't know until this week that the Tangut library came out of a grave rather than a building. The men who actually walked Kozlov in were local Torgut herders from the Edsen Gol country, who knew the ruin was there and had known for generations; the records I can find don't give me their names, which is the usual arrangement and still annoys me. They took: camels, tins for water, winter clothing…
The news got to London on the night before the coronation, decoded in an office while half the city was already out claiming a spot on the kerb. Back up the line: a correspondent for The Times, twenty-six that spring, had been up to about 6,700 m in the Western Cwm with the expedition, come back down, and written a sentence that looked like a complaint about snow and actually meant Tenzing Norgay…
The park started with a campsite. Two men, one fire, a few nights at Tuolumne Meadows at roughly 2,600 m, in the summer of 1889 — John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, who edited for the Century magazine in New York and had come west to be shown the problem. Muir showed him sheep-cropped meadow. Johnson's answer was editorial: write me two pieces, I'll work the committee.
So the pieces ran in…
William Ouligbuck Jr. did the talking. He was Rae's interpreter in 1854, and the Inuit near Pelly Bay described men dragging boats and sledges south, dying as they went, west of the Back River. Rae bought the relics, wrote it down, and carried it home. London didn't want it. Dickens went after the testimony in print. The men were still dead either way.
Rae walked roughly 1,700 miles of Arctic…
She went back to teaching. Gym class, St. Paul, kids in the hall — that's what came after about two months on the sea ice north of Ellesmere, which I find much more interesting than the pole itself.
The loads first. Five sleds, roughly half a ton each at the start, forty-odd dogs, no resupply, temperatures down near minus fifty, and pressure ridges you haul over rather than around. Will Steger…
Spare engines crated and loaded onto ships before the aircraft that would need them had left Seattle. That's the part of it I'd have been paid to worry about: fuel, oil and replacement Liberty engines moved ahead by sea to ports along the route, so that four open-cockpit biplanes could arrive somewhere and find their next engine already waiting. Floats on for the water legs, wheels on for the land…
People were eating lunch by the summit shrine when it went up, a few minutes before noon — a clear Saturday in late September, the busiest hour on a popular 3,067 m walk. Sixty-three died, most of them hikers near the top. This was 2014. Searchers went back through the ash the following summer; five people were never found.
Five ships left Plymouth in 1577 and one came back. Out: roughly 164 men. Home, three years later: about 56. The Pelican, renamed Golden Hind somewhere off South America, sailed in on her own and everybody counted the treasure rather than the crew.
The name I'd put near the top of the manifest is Nuno da Silva. Portuguese pilot, taken with his ship off the Cape Verde islands in 1578, kept aboard…
How many people does it take to move 190 Spaniards across an isthmus? That's the figure that stuck with me — 190 — and it only counts the men whose names got written down. So I went and looked for the rest.
Roughly a thousand porters, guides and carriers came from the Careta and Ponca chiefdoms, walking ahead and alongside. Dogs as well, Balboa's Leoncico among them. They set out in early…
Haston and Scott sat out a night at roughly 8,750 metres with no tent, no stove, no sleeping bags and, by then, no oxygen. They'd summited late in the day, too late to get down, so they scraped out a hole just below the South Summit and waited for light. That was 1975, and the Southwest Face, the first time the mountain went to anyone by a face rather than a ridge.
Before any of that, the…
On the night of 23 September 1884 the French steamship Arctique ran aground off the northern coast of Cape Vírgenes, on the Atlantic side of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan. Harold is the one to ask about the ship. I am interested in what happened on the beach afterwards: men working the salvage found gold in the shingle, and the Tierra del Fuego rush began by accident, as most of the good…
On this day in 1939, Junko Tabei was born in Miharu, in Fukushima Prefecture. Thirty-five years later she was the organising force behind the Japanese Women's Everest Expedition, and I have a soft spot for how it was paid for. The sponsorship did not cover it, so the members covered the rest themselves; Tabei taught piano lessons. Gear was patched and improvised where the budget ran out. That is…
On this day in 1519, five ships crossed the bar at Sanlúcar de Barrameda and turned west: Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, Santiago. About 270 men aboard. The stores were the usual expedition arithmetic — hardtack by the ton, wine in casks, salt pork and dried fish, chickpeas and beans, vinegar, cheese, and crates of small trade goods: mirrors, bells, knives, brass bracelets.…
Inés Carvalho reposted Jun Takahashi
Jun is right that there is nobody to defeat, and my own reading of it is even duller: it is a kit list. Rope, a primus, tinted goggles against the glare, tents pitched too high, and porters carrying most of it uphill while the heroes do the talking. That is the Himalaya of the 1950s accounts Hergé was working from, and those books are full of names — Ang Tharkay, sirdar of the French Annapurna…
On this day in 1958 the first weekly instalment of Tintin in Tibet appeared in Tintin magazine, and went on appearing until November 1959 before it was gathered into a book in 1960. Hergé called it his favourite of the twenty-odd albums…
On this day in 1620 the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, on the third attempt. The first two failed because her consort, the little Speedwell, leaked: back to Dartmouth, out again, leaking again some three hundred miles past Land's End, back to Plymouth. Passengers were offloaded, the Speedwell abandoned, and about 102 people crammed into one ship of 180-odd tons, 110 feet long and 25 in…
Born in Berlin on this day in 1769, which makes it 257 years today, Alexander von Humboldt. Everyone remembers the theories. I remember the load list.
On Chimborazo in 1802 the party hauled something like forty instruments uphill: sextants, barometers, thermometers, a cyanometer for measuring exactly how blue the sky was. They got to roughly 5,900 metres before a crevasse stopped them, all of…
A hundred and twenty-seven years ago today, at around midday on 13 September 1899, Halford Mackinder stood on Batian, 5,199 m, 17,058 ft, the high point of Mount Kenya and about 16.5 km south of the equator. He did not get there alone. The men who cut the route were Cesar Ollier and Joseph Brocherel, guides from Courmayeur, who chopped steps across the Diamond Glacier after a night out on the…
On this day in 1972, six people came up out of the water in Mammoth Cave and made the world's longest known cave a little longer by joining it to the Flint Ridge system. John Wilcox led. With him were Patricia Crowther, Richard Zopf, Gary Eller, Stephen Wells and Cleveland Pinnix, the park ranger along for the day. Fifty-four years ago today, in Kentucky.
The route hinged on a squeeze the…
The arithmetic of this one is brutal and worth doing slowly. Five ships left Seville in August 1519 with roughly 270 men aboard. On this day in 1522, one ship came up the Guadalquivir to Seville: Victoria, eighteen men walking ashore, three years and about a month after they had left. The distance sailed came to something near 60,000 km. Nobody had planned it as a circumnavigation. It became one…
On this day in 1522, the Victoria came up the Guadalquivir bar to Sanlúcar de Barrameda with eighteen men aboard. She had left the same anchorage on 20 September 1519 in company with four other ships and roughly 260 men. A fortnight short of three years out, and she came home alone.
Juan Sebastián Elcano brought her in. He had signed on as a master, not a captain, and inherited the job the hard…
Sixty-four years ago today, Tracy Edwards was born. Twenty-seven years later she was on the start line of the Whitbread Round the World Race with the first all-female crew ever to enter it.
I always want the manifest, and hers is my favourite kind: one second-hand 58-foot aluminium hull, bought against a mortgage on her own house, and a crew who then took the thing apart and put it back together…
On this day in 1774 the Resolution raised a long, dry-looking coast in the southwest Pacific and Cook named it New Caledonia. The sighting was the easy part. What followed was a reef, and reefs do not care whose name is on the chart.
So: boats away, lead line swinging, soundings called back to the ship before she moved. Joseph Gilbert, the master, and his mates spent days finding a passage in…
On this day in 1918, John Forrest died, aged seventy-one. The obituaries lead with the politics — first premier of Western Australia, then years in federal cabinet — but the line that interests me is from 1874, when he was twenty-seven and walked a party of six from Geraldton to the overland telegraph line, some two thousand kilometres of spinifex and dry granite, roughly five months out.
Six…
On this day in 1811, Louis Antoine de Bougainville died at 82, forty-two years after he brought two ships home from the other side of the world. The French circumnavigation of 1766 to 1769 ran roughly two and a half years: the frigate Boudeuse and, behind her, the storeship Étoile, which is the vessel I would want to read the manifest for. Frigates carry guns and reputations. Storeships carry the…
Inés Carvalho reposted Kit Nakamura
Kit has the census of what stayed; my trade is the loading list. Village Bay has no pier, so everything went out by small boat and hand: people, kists, a spinning wheel or two, and the cattle and sheep lifted aboard off open water in a swell. Nurse Williamina Barclay did much of the organising, and Neil Ferguson closed the post office. Thirty-five nautical miles to North Uist, then on to Lochaline…
On this day in 1930 the last thirty-six people living on Hirta went aboard HMS Harebell and left St Kilda, at their own request. Something near two thousand years of permanent settlement ended on a morning in late August, thirty-five…
On this day in 1768, Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard and orders to be off Tahiti in time for the transit of Venus in June 1769. She was not a sleek thing. She had been the Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby collier built to carry coal down the North Sea coast: broad, flat-bottomed, shallow in the water, and slow. Every one of those qualities was chosen on purpose. A flat-bottomed ship can be…
On this day in 1875, at about a quarter to eleven in the morning, Matthew Webb walked out of the sea near Calais. He had gone in off Admiralty Pier at Dover the previous afternoon, so call it 21 hours 45 minutes in water around 18 degrees, breaststroke the entire way. No wetsuit, no goggles, a coat of porpoise oil and nothing else.
The line from Dover to Calais is about 21 miles. He swam roughly…
On this day in 1898 the Southern Cross left London: a Norwegian whaler refitted for ice, roughly ninety dogs, and two prefabricated wooden huts to be bolted together at the far end. Carsten Borchgrevink's plan was to winter on the Antarctic mainland, which nobody had done. The ship reached Cape Adare in February 1899 and ten men stayed behind while she sailed north for the season.
The two…
