Nicholas Storey - Great British Adventurers

One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

From Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I N CHOOSING my particular adventurers I have had to find limits. The first has been to confine my selection to men and women who are (at least loosely), British, and even then, service and adoption have sometimes, as with Krystyna Skarbek-Granville (Christine Granville), taken the place of birth. I have chosen to ignore such things as competing national claims for Tenzing Norgay. The second limit I have set myself is generally to exclude heroic adventurers in battle, simply because there is (rightly), so much already written about them. I have, however, found place for certain (representative) female secret agents of the Second World War, whose acts (in voluntary service, beyond the call of simple duty), surely took them out of the arena of straightforward battle and into the realm of the most individual and courageous adventure. They were, moreover, the first modern, female British warriors, not just on the front line but behind it on the enemys own turf, long, long before any calls on the grounds of sex equality put modern women into battle.

The result of my decisions remains to be judged, but the overall objective has been to renew interest in the lives of some of our real heroes and heroines as representative of the many others that there are, in an age in which contemporary sporting and pop art heroes dominate the news and provide the only readily evident inspiration, and also an age in which addiction to the computer screen nearly robs the young of memories and dreams of the high adventure of which ripping yarns are made.

The third limit is a limit of time. This speaks for itself, otherwise how would Drake and Raleigh, Clive of India, General Woolf and Captain Cook not have found their places? There have to be such limits. The final limit has been to exclude those who are widely famed already. What more is there to say in a book of this size, of General Gordon or Dr David Livingstone; of Charles Darwin, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Captain Laurence Oates, Ernest Shackleton and T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, even though what has been said should never be forgotten? Moreover, although Sir Edmund Hillary is acknowledged as the first conqueror of Mount Everest, Tenzing Norgay was there with him. And what of George Mallory who, sometime before, had died, either going up or coming down?