TheEconomistOctober 12th 2019 851F
orty yearsago, in the autumn of 1979, a
group of British explorers set out from
London on a seemingly impossible mis-
sion: a circumpolar navigation of the
Earth. Over the three years of what was
known as the Transglobe Expedition, they
would struggle against high seas in the
Roaring Forties, evade hungry polar bears,
negotiate mountainous sand dunes and
forbidding jungles. There was another dan-
ger, more insidious and less photogenic
than any of these, but which nonetheless
posed a threat to their endeavour—bore-
dom. This was to be particularly acute in
Antarctica, where, after traversing Africa,
the group was obliged to spend months
huddled in icy darkness.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes and the team he
had assembled undertook their journey in
a much less technological age. There was
no satellite navigation; messages to and
from their base camp were sent in Morse
code by Sir Ranulph’s wife, Ginny, who was
in charge of communications. Nor were
there any Kindles. A big part of the cargo
aboard the Benjamin Bowring, the expedi-
tion’s ice-breaker, was books.Fortified by this reserve, the team un-
dertook two adventures at once—one of
the body and one on the page, both involv-
ing extreme conditions, endless vistas and
unsettling claustrophobia. Both laid bare
the personalities of the participants, and
both left their marks.Strange seas of thought, alone
The plan for Antarctica was to spend the
first brief summer getting the main
group—Sir Ranulph, Ginny and two former
members of the sas, Charlie Burton and Ol-
iver Shepard—up onto the lofty Antarctic
Plateau, where they would wait out the
eight-month polar winter before embark-
ing on their crossing of the continent in the
spring. They succeeded in establishingthemselves on the 3,000-metre-high ice
shelf. “I dug an awful lot of snow, dug tun-
nels, dug slop pits and latrines,” Sir Ra-
nulph, now 75, recalls. The Antarctic leg
“required an enormous amount of time
crouched over maps. But there was time for
reading, and we read a lot.”
At Eton he had been taught French by
David Cornwell, the alter ego of John le
Carré: “He developed in me a lasting love of
literature, of the sound of great language.”
Penguin, the publisher, had offered to
sponsor them, Sir Ranulph explains. He
took 50 volumes by classic British au-
thors—Dickens, Scott, Thackeray and Trol-
lope (“Dickens was always a bit like coming
home”). For his part, Burton requested a
boxful of Westerns. Mr Shepard, mean-
while, had “hardly read at all when I went
out there”. Before the expedition he had
worked in the wine trade; he now lives in
France. But “we were in a hut the size of a
garden shed,” he recalls, and reading “was
the only form of escape I had.”
His preference was for an epic tale of ad-
venture, played out against a hostile and
perilous landscape. “I read ‘The Lord of the
Rings’ trilogy seven times,” Mr Shepard
says. “It seemed to appertain so closely to
what we had decided to undertake.” He be-
lieves that this prolonged engagement
with literature left a lasting impression.
More than simply being a diversion, it “put
me on the path of an avid reader”. He re-
members “War and Peace” and Kafka as
“hard work” but “worth it”. (Ginny Fiennes
died in 2004, Burton in 2002.)Adventures in booksThe library of ice
An expedition reveals the perils of reading Dostoyevsky in AntarcticaBooks & arts
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