Arctic Adventure
By PETER FLEMING
Tina book is a full and unusually faithful record of the British Trans-Greenland Expedition, 1984. Those who have a special interest in such matters are already familiar, through Mr. Lindsay's dispatches to The Times and his paper to the Royal geographical Society, with the nature and scope of the expedition's achievements. For the benefit of the very much Wider public to whom this admirable book should appeal the 'journey can be superficially summarised, as follows. Mr. Lindsay's object, which first occurred to him when he Was in Greenland in 1981 as a member of Gino Watkins' British Arctic Air Route Expedition, and which had since been carefully Worked out 'in detail, was to cross the Ice-cap in the neigh- bourhood of lat. 70° N., and then work his way down through the mountainous East Greenland hinterland between Scoresby Sound and Mount Forel, to emerge at Angmagssalik with a 8.aryey of the highest mountains in the Arctic. These moon.; tEties , which were entirely unknown in 1931, had since been Photographed from the air by Danish explorers ; but Mr. Lindsay and his two companions were the first travellers to carry out a ground survey, and . their work—done under appalling conditions—has produced -results which are an extremely valuable contribution to our geographical knowledge of the Arctic.
But ,tjag average reader, who is not deeply concerned. with geographical knowledge, and thinks that a theodolite is a Welts man who lives in caves and an azimuth is a cough cure, Will be interested not so much in the results as in the means by which they were obtained. These were, very briefly, a sledging journey of 1,180 miles, during all except 130 miles of Which the party of three men (average age 20) was self-support- ing ; it took them 108 dayS, and they finished the course With 21 days' man food and one day's dog food in hand. ()wing to' early ice, they avoided by only a very few hours being stranded at Angmagssalik for the best part of a year.
The journey was, by any standards, heroic. The ptindits, Who can always be relied on to be wise after the event, were hi this case foolish before it ; the Royal Geographical Society refused to support what they regarded as not much better than a suicide pact. They no doubt had their reasons for refusing ; but before taking their decision they might have Considered that they were in effect branding Mr. Lindsay, in the eyes of all other learned societies, of the Foreign Office, and of the Danish Government, as an irresponsible adventurer. It was, indeed, only a blunder in Whitehall which enabled Mr. Lindsay's application for the necessary permission to be forwarded to the Danish Government.
Arctic, antarctic, or polar travel is a highly specialised business, usually comprising a strong element of monotony. From the literary point of view I take it to be caviar to the general ; not everybody wants a Byrd in the hand. But I cannot imagine anybody failing to enjoy Mr. Lindsay's book. Its central theme is a race with death, and perhaps that was bound to be exciting anyhow. But Mr. Lindsay is the first raan in his line of business to tell us what it was really like.
lie begins by describing in lull—and, 'to me, fascinating -- detail the preparations which his expedition entailed—the
hiring of equipment, the dunning of firms for free supplies, the publishers' ,contracts, the official dernarehes—all the rather ' Sordid preliminaries which in these un-Elizabethan days ' make adventure possible. Once on the Ice-cap, he rejects Sledge. By Martin Lindsay. (Cassell. 21s.) (with perhaps rather too 'much of a flourish) the convention which decrees that every expedition is composed, in print, of superhuman automata; indistinguishable members of a 'mutual admiration society. His companions, Mr. Croft and Mr. Godfrey, have pliteed at his disposal, unexpurgated, the diaries which they,kept during the journey ; and their leader, who admits freely to ' his errors and his failings, underlines each admission with a quotation wherein we see reflected the reactions produced by those errors on the two other men whose destinies they so intimately affected., Mr. Lindsay's candour Produces no high spots 'of melodrama, no scenes of bitterness and tension, because all three were first-class men and perhaps also becatise their leader led them better than he knows ; but his methods succeed in making the 'whole adventure intensely real, and it is Iiiseinating to watch the three indi- a';idualities define themsdve.s Lindsay, impatient but experi- :enced, optimistic but always conscious of how inuch he was staking and against What odds ; croft, gallant and rather prefectorial, suffering (without complaint) more than the others from cold and hunger because Of, his lower- "cireulation ; Godfrey the Old Etonian, the most highly 'strung and the least experienced of the three, reading Emma
(which his leader finds " too milk-and-water ") and emergink. .
splendidly from the ordeal a the survey work. ' To sum up, from the middle of June to the beginning of September last year, three young men carried out an Arctic journey which has never been done before and which in England was considered by the highest authorities too hazar- douS to be given their support. During this journey their life had more strangeness and more urgency than the life of any other civilised men during the same period. This book tells you exactly what that life was like-=what they read, said, hoped, feared, and ate : why they drove their dogs on a fan-trace instead of a centre-trace, how after a time they
• could eat but could not drink their cocoa, which were their narrowest escapes from disaster, and what kind of food each was looking forward to most.' Nor must it be thought that Mr, Lindsay is " popular " at the expense of being technical; he has already given an account of himself to the profeSsionals, and if his text is neither sufficiently dry nor sufficiently impersonal for their liking, they will find both qualities properly exemplified in a series of appendices. Mr. Lindsay writes simply, light-heartedly, and aboVe all readably. Occasionally he strains after effect; occasionally he is too facetious ; but on the whole I do not see how his thrilling story could'have been more acceptably presented. Mr. Croft'S photographs, WhiCh have already been exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society, are superb.
Mr. Lindsay's critics have suggested that his mountains should have been taCkled front the east coast, on which-they
are situated, and that the crossing of the ice-cap was a piece of dangerous and unnecessary bravado. I do not pretend to know the form myself ; but when the party got to Angmagssalik they met a French expedition whose assault on
the mountains fron'i the east. had been thwarted by pack-ice, and heard of an Italian expedition whose plans had shared
that fate. I dare say that is not a complete answer to the
critics ; they are difficult people to please who, after continu- ally reprimanding. the youth of this country for degeneracy, effeminacy, and God knows what, turn round, as soon as one of us does happen to do something rather gallant, and . say he did it as. a stunt,
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