Henry Worsley and the Urge to Explore

Recently retired after a distinguished 36-year career in the British army, Mr. Worsley sought to combine his two life-long passions in one big effort: crossing the entire Antarctic landmass, from one coastline to the other, solo, unsupported and unassisted, with the ultimate goal of raising up to £100,000 through donations to the Endeavour Fund - a charity fund run by the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry - to help soldiers injured in service.

Before him, just two people had travelled the entire route solo, both with some kind of help: Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland in 1996-97, using a kite to pull his sled, and British meteorologist Felicity Ashton in 2012, with two supply drops en route.

No stranger to Antarctic, Mr. Worsley had already led two expeditions through the southernmost continent. In 2008, he led an expedition to pioneer a route through the Transantarctic Mountains to commemorate the centenary of Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition. He returned to the Antarctic in 2011, leading a team of six to retracing Roald Amundsen's successful 1912 journey to the South Pole, marking its centenary. In doing so, he became the first person to have successfully undertaken all three of the routes taken by Shackleton, Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott.

But this last undertaking was to become the boldest one of all. Completely cut off from the outside world on a boundless ice field that stretches as far as the eye can see, with just a satellite phone to communicate his daily conditions and whereabouts, Worsley held on for almost 70 days, battling extreme conditions and walking the route almost entirely. But on day 71, with just 30 miles left to go, the 55-year-old Londoner was forced to surrender due to a "sheer inability to slide one ski in front of the other." Airlifted to Clinica Magallanes in Punta Arenas, Chile, he died from complications related to a severe bacterial peritonitis that had already compromised his organs.

Although the expedition’s ultimate goal was to raise funds for charity (to date, the amount has reached £317,000), the quest that took Worsley’s life has been the subject to some harsh criticism by those who believe such feats have nothing to do with exploration, but instead appear to be a way our modern world provides to demonstrate one’s exceptional abilities.

A few days after Worsley’s death, The New York Times hosted and op-ed penned by David Roberts, the author of twenty-six books about mountaineering, exploration, adventure, and Western history and anthropology. In it Roberts wrote:

"Today, the continent has been completely mapped. Adventurers strive for "firsts" — fastest times from A to B, or long-distance treks with a minimum of support. The goal is not discovery, but setting records […] Henry Worsley’s solo journey was a grueling and perilous one […] But he followed a well-planned course across terra cognita. Nothing he found was new. The trend toward record setting has overtaken what used to be called exploration," he wrote.

"These epic efforts at "firsts" seem to have obscured the true exploration that is taking place around the globe. Cavers are in the middle of their own golden age, as the deepest and largest underground grottoes remain undiscovered. In serious caving, there are no hourly communications by satellite phone, no rescues by plane or helicopter. No wonder, then, that the best cavers are uninterested in speed records or endurance feats per se. They’re busy trying to find out what lies underground."

Without a doubt, Roberts is familiar with what he is talking about and his biting remarks can be shared broadly. They underlining some thorny questions such as the overestimated importance given to "firsts," the encroaching use of technology, and the fact that those who, even now, profess to be explorers are often people who simply tap exploration as a pretext or means to show off their superior force or skills, Roberts gets this point across more than once. By following Roberts’ line of thinking though, we end up tarring everyone with the same brush, while knowing perfectly that seeing things in a manner which is too black and white has always led to impartial apologies and rarely to in-depth and constructive analysis.

Mr. Roberts’ viewpoint, whereby there is only one type of true and genuine exploration left nowadays, appears to be vitiated by a notion of exploration and all its ramifications which is, when all things are said and done, still romantic. The underlying idea is that since there is no longer the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever, the only genuine exploration that can be done is the one that is science-oriented, designed to scour the last unknown corners of the earth, in places where there is no regular communication, no emergency rescues, and no spasmodic interest in speed records or endurance feats. Admittedly, exploration is inextricably linked to discovering the hitherto undiscovered, and consequently the amount of risk early explorers underwent, and the sheer unknown they faced, has no equals.

Yet the biggest mistakes one can make by following this line of thinking would be to conceive exploration as merely a matter of science and discovery. To believe that thousands of men were driven to the brink of survival by simply their unquenchable urge to discover what was out there, without taking into account personal issues and those linked to the society, is deceptive. Just like everything else, exploration has always been a child of its time. And this is exactly why, as early as the 15th century and up until the middle of the last century, exploration embodied the West’s colonizing settlement policy, and today it can do no more than to mirror the conditions and needs of a nihilistic, limitless and self-referential society for which setting new records is just a way to cover a sprawling identity crisis.

Reasons were sometimes fiercer than those expressed today. In his foreword to South!, the official account about his last expedition in the Antarctic, Sir Shackleton wrote: "After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen, who, by a narrow margin of days only, was in advance of the British Expedition under Scott, there remained but one great main object of Antarctic journeyings--the crossing of the South Polar continent from sea to sea." As can be seen, even Shackleton pursued his own "first." A virtually useless one, since the South Pole had already been conquered and what was left to do was to scour, survey, and explore the remains of what used to be called Terra Australis. There was no rush to do so, yet those familiar with the topic know that an insane urgency – in other words, the will to achieve a result before the others - claimed the lives of hundreds.

It comes as no surprise therefore that, in her 2007 Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the changing face of heroism, English historian Stephanie Barczewski described Shackleton as a person obsessed with finding rapid pathways to wealth and security. The list could go on and on, but it would be nothing more than an exercise in style: comparing modern exploration to what took place over the past decades and centuries doesn't make much sense, and neither does comparing earlier characters to those of today, because there is no common ground from which to start.
The radical change the world has been undergoing has caused many things to appear simply senseless today, which is, unfortunately, true in the majority of cases – in particular since extreme sports entered into the public domain.

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As a matter of fact, "why" has always been the thorniest question for those who decided to perform certain feats, while knowing full-well that the chances of dying are the same as making it back alive. Until only a few decades ago, the pretext of discovery sufficed. Then, when this no longer sufficed, with the end of the colonial era and state-backed or private-funded expeditions, and with a world almost completely surveyed, studied and explained, "why" has become somewhat of a conundrum.

In his 2003 Mountains of the Mind, English academic and travel writer Robert Macfarlane recalls a meeting with a woman whose cousin had been killed in a fall the previous year. The woman was angry and bewildered by what had happened. "Why had he felt the need to mountaineer, she asked me, not wanting an answer. Why couldn’t he have played tennis, or gone fishing?"

Similarly, after 36 years of honorable career, Worsley could easily have enjoyed a comfortable retirement while still in excellent health. Yet, he did not. When asked why he was going to cross Antarctica solo, Henry Worsley staunchly stated: "What will drive me on is raising money for wounded soldiers, guys who face a lifetime of adversity. So if I can help them, I do this."

Worsley’s aspiration was as admirable as possible and no one should argue about a person who endangers his life to help others. It is not the first time this happened. To take one example: Alan Arnette, a Colorado-based mountaineer and the oldest American to summit K2 at 58 in 2014, has been carrying on a project that sees him climbing the world’s highest peaks to raise funds and awareness for Alzheimer’s since 2009, when his mother passed away due to this illness.

Although we are dealing with someone whose views are akin to each other, it is quite easy to fathom that the breadth of their feats is far greater and far harder to define than any charitable aspiration, which adds but does not take anything away from their overall value.

On second thought, now that exploration has fittingly freed itself from its traditional embellishments, and that to justify its raison d’être it increasingly levers on crowdfunding and charity, a perspective that has been long ignored comes to the forefront: exploration as need for modern man. An activity that can be carried out regardless of whether in-depth knowledge of something is already available, regardless of whether others have already set foot there. After all, as any dictionary confirms, exploration is not just the investigation of unknown regions, but also the act of exploring.

This facet of exploration is constantly concealed due to the error we make in categorizing everything into the obvious, controlled, and controllable. Jon Krakauer’s words come to mind, who in his world-famous Into the Wild, wrote: "There's no blank spots on the map anymore, anywhere on earth. If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind."

Seen from this perspective, exploration takes on an even greater meaning. The overwhelming majority of people spend most of their time in environments that are people-oriented and humanly customized. By observing obsequiously prearranged and well-defined lines, methods, and timescale, one forgets that there are environments that do not respond to the press of a button or an command from above, but which are ruled by different orders and rhythms.

In going where these schemes have no value, where there are greater forces and timespans which cannot be forecast or controlled, can disprove the excessive trust we place in everything which is man-made. Even if, by following this line of thinking, some may argue that exploration can even take place within a metropolis of ten million people, it is just as true that only the wildernesses can undermine our compliant conviction that the world has been made for humans by humans.

Exploring wild places can also make us reconsider ourselves and our inner thoughts. It can be a natural field of activity where, in resetting and readjusting the points from which we take our bearings, we can wittingly abandon everything, to discover the freedom which we are frantically struggling for and which is as essential to us as our daily bread.

When all things are said and done, man has always wanted to go as far as possible: southbound, westbound, to the moon, across the oceans, down into caves, abyss, across deserts and on to summits. This is why exploration does not end with terra cognita, simply because today, just like two hundred years ago, it could still be a free choice. Much more inconvenient than we might believe, where you can feel completely alone even in a group of ten, where you are defenseless despite all the sophisticated equipment you might posses, and where every decision you make must be borne on your shoulders. As if you are in a stormy sea, faced by 100-foot waves. No one can do anything about it and you are the only one that can deal the burden of the decision that brought you there.

This impulse is not nourished by convenience, usefulness, or level of danger, and that is why someday the Antarctic will be crossed solo and unaided, K2 and Nanga Parbat will be climbed in winter, and the world’s most unnavigable rivers will be rafted. Nobody wants or thinks that they will change the world by doing so, but what would happen if we gave up exploring altogether, believing we know all about everything around us?

by Marcello Rossi

Marcello Rossi is a freelance journalist, with a penchant for adventures and the mountains, specialized in politics, culture and society. He reported for the World section of the New York based International Business Times and is currently contributing writer for Wired Italia. His own blog is www.marcellorossi.net