David Roberts - Into the Great Emptiness: Peril and Survival on the Greenland Ice Cap

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On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined

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True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna

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Jean Stafford: A Biography

Great Exploration Hoaxes

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Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative

The Mountain of My Fear

PERIL AND SURVIVAL ON THE GREENLAND ICE CAP

DAVID ROBERTS

Publishers Note

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., wishes to thank the Estate of Sir Martin Lindsay* for its kind permission to quote substantive passages from Those Greenland Days, Lindsays own account of the British Arctic Air Route Expedition to the east coast of Greenland in 193031, which is the thrilling subject of Into the Great Emptiness by David Roberts. Gino Watkins, the head of the expedition, was acknowledged by his colleagues as a brilliant explorer and leader of men, though he was the youngest member of the group. But Watkins died in a kayaking accident shortly after BAARE left Greenland, leaving no account of what he and his men had accomplished, not even notes. Hence the importance of books and recollections by other BAARE members. David Roberts relied extensively on the account in Those Greenland Days in his research, because of the way in which Sir Martin recounted his careful observation of the very many telling details that allow the reader to understand what it was really like to be on such an expedition in Greenland.

* Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Martin Lindsay of Dowhill, Bt., CBE, DSO, (22 August 19055 May 1981) was a British Army officer, polar explorer, politician, and author.

Copyright 2022 by David Roberts

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Jacket design: Kelly Winton

Jacket photograph: Watkins on Ice Cap, Frederick Spencer

Chapman; Scott Polar Research Institute, University of

Cambridge, with permission

Book design by Patrice Sheridan

Production manager: Julia Druskin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 978-0-393-86811-1

ISBN 978-0-393-86812-8

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For Stuart Krichevsky
Wisest of agents,
Most loyal of friends,
And for me, a reason to keep going

INTO THE GREAT EMPTINESS

JAMIE SCOTT AND Quintin Riley outfitted two sledges, rounded up the huskies, and harnessed them into their leads. The mission on which they were about to set out was in one sense a familiar one. Members of the team had performed it three times the previous autumn. But this time a hectic urgency hung over their preparations. A single man, having passed the winter alone, lay waiting in the big domed tent that served as the expeditions Ice Cap Station. August Courtauld, who had volunteered for the solo vigil at the beginning of December, needed to be relieved from a duty the likes of which had never before been attempted anywhere on earth.

The date was March 1, 1931. From the expedition base camp in a nestling fjord on the east coast of Greenland, Scott and Riley needed to climb through the steep glacial headwall that had given the team fits on every previous foray, then head across the blank immensity of the ice cap, following the red flags planted in the snow at every half mile, until they reached the station, 130 miles inland and 8,200 feet above sea level. The five men who had pioneered the route in August 1930 had spent two weeks in the effort. Scott and Riley hoped their own relief journey would take no longer.

The expedition had chosen as its clunky title the British Arctic Air Route Expedition, acronymed as BAARE. It comprised fourteen men, all but one in their twenties, most of them students or graduates from Cambridge University. Among them, only Courtauld had been to Greenland before, on a pair of modest probes of the ice packtormented east coast. But Courtauld was not the expedition leader. That man was Henry George Watkins, nicknamed Gino since childhood (despite no family ties to Italy). The BAARE was entirely Watkinss campaign, a vastly ambitious exploratory attack on the largest island in the worldand one of the least known parts of the globe. Gino devised seven separate mini-expeditions to be carried out across the span of sixteen months. By 1930 he was already the veteran of two previous probes of the geographical unknown that he had organized himself, to Svalbard in the high Arctic and Labrador on the eastern coast of North America. Yet at the outset of the BAARE, Watkins was only twenty-three years oldthe youngest of all its members. His youth notwithstanding, Ginos assault on Greenland would constitute the most daring and fruitful British expedition to the Far North during the previous half century, comparable in its stature among the nations polar exploits only to the Antarctic missions of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton two decades earlier.

More than a century after their deaths, Scott and Shackleton are enshrined as legendary explorers. Yet, as even his admirers admit, Gino Watkins has lapsed into the limbo of the forgotten hero. The reasons are several. By dying in the early days of his fourth expedition in a fluke accident at the age of twenty-five, he blazed a track across the heavens that winked out like that of a meteor that never reaches earth. Unlike Scott and Shackleton, Watkins was too busy planning each subsequent jaunt to write more than a couple of dry articles for the Geographical Journal . The expedition books were written by his teammates.