‘Exploration in the age of National Geographic & Explorer’s Club’

All Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian

By Nitin Gairola

The last 130 odd years have seen the rise of exploration societies and communities. One such is the National Geographic Society (founded on 22 September 1888) that releases the iconic yellow bordered monthly magazine. The Explorer’s Club in New York City is another such, formed in 1904 at the turn of the 20^th century. These two were America’s answer to the Royal Geographical Society in London that was founded way back in 1830. These organisations have both fueled and funded the need of humans to explore the unknown, both geographically and scientifically. This drive to explore was at times to create records, for glory, and at times to further our understanding of the planet and the cosmos. But this was both restless and driven and these societies met this basic need of us humans.

So, by the late 19^th century after the habitable world of the Americas and Australia had been explored and African interiors chartered (somewhat), man started searching for extremes – the two poles, the frozen southern continent, the Arctic or even the highest and lowest places on Earth. From an archeological point of view there were many ‘lost civilisations’ waiting to see the ‘light of day’ (like Machu Picchu or Petra). There was a build up to this extreme exploration when curious people started going to places that were known but never properly researched or documented – these were the remote lands of Siberia, northern Arctic islands of Canada, and the deserts of the world. Jungles were being explored too, but there is so much of it still unexplored even to this day, impenetrable as they are.

Siberia & Northern Canada

The cold and hostile Siberia was the far eastern part of the Russian Empire. Vitus Bering, a Dane, made good use of the need of Peter the Great of Russia to know his nation and to modernise it and was selected as the person to go right up to the remote Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east of Russia. The peninsula appears like a dagger over Japan on the world map and is dotted with fiery volcanoes and icy mountains. From 1724 to 1741, Vitus Bering mapped the coastline of Siberia and also confirmed that Russia and Alaska are close but not joint at the strait that now bears his name – the Bering Strait.

In other fridge white spaces, Finnish explorer Adolf Nordenskiold would cross the waters above northern Siberia all the way from Europe to Asia in 1880. And while Britain’s John Franklin failed to cross the waters to Asia from the other side of the world (i.e., through Canada’s North-West passage) it was the Norwegian ace adventurer Roald Amundsen who did so in 1906. It was a major achievement for Norway and was the start of the Norway – England exploration rivalry in the 20^th century.

Unexplored Deserts of Asia

Deserts, being mostly inland, were also less explored at this time especially those on the Silk Route (Kara-Kum, Kyzyl-Kum, Taklimakan, Gobi, Tibet) and also the Arabian, Syrian and those in Iran. The Silk Route of Central Asia was famously charted by Sven Hedin in his four expeditions from 1890 to 1935. Another man inspired by Hedin was Marc Aurel Stein, who was an archeologist. He brought (or stole) lots of ancient scrolls and texts and took them to Britain from Samarkand (in Uzbekistan) and also from western China. He is referred to as a ‘thief’ in these countries.

Shifting our compass towards the Middle East of that time, it was a land least open to Europeans and hence had this mystery and aura and an irresistible charm. The known explorers were Johann Ludwig Burckhardt of Switzerland, who arrived in ancient Syria and in 1812 reached Egypt and en route visited the 2,200 year old magnificent city of Petra in present day Jordan. Burckhardt also visited Arabia during his travels. Richard Burton and Charles Doughty followed his path as well and spent considerable time with the nomadic Bedouins of Arabia. During World War-I, Colonel TE Lawrence travelled far across the Arabia deserts in 1916, including the barren Al Nafud. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ is the 1962 Hollywood classic on his story and is possibly my favourite movie of all time. If I may say so, it is truly timeless just like the sands of Arabia.

The deserts also drew four more notable travellers in the 20^th century and the best part was that two of the four were women explorers who finally made their mark in the field of exploration. The two men were Bertram Thomas who explored the ‘Empty Quarter’ in Arabia in 1930 and Wilfred Thesiger who did the same and went to Iraq as well from 1945 to 1958. Wilfred had travelled to the deserts of Ethiopia, Eretria and Somalia and those of Central Asia as well. This made him a very widely travelled desert explorer.

And coming to the women desert explorers, there was the famous ‘Queen of the Desert’ and English writer, Gertrude Bell, who went to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Israel and Arabia between 1899 and 1926 and even crossed paths with ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The other lady was British-Italian Freya Stark, who lived a long life of 100 years and died only in 1993. She travelled across the Middle East and wrote numerous books on her extensive travels to exotic places which included Afghanistan too.

Revolution of Transportation and Evolution of Explorers

Without the industrial revolution there would be no development in transportation, something so central to exploration. Smooth roads were being made from coal and that led to the creation of the automobile. The trains chugged on steel rails and large steel ships were built too, like the ill-fated Titanic. And, finally, what really helped both explorers and travellers to reach far off places was the aluminum aeroplane. It all started with the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers on 17 December 1903 and that moment was probably as big in terms of globalisation as was the discovery of America by Columbus. Flight would also give us a brand new perspective on the planet, a bird’s eye view and the big picture if you will.

Race to the Poles

For both poles, the race had begun in the 19^th century, although the prize would be claimed in the early 20^th only. Norwegian Carstens Borchgrevink became the first man to set foot in Antarctica in 1895, but the world’s attention was more on the North Pole since most of the explorers of Europe and America were closer to it. Towards this quest we had many heroic failures starting with that of Charles Hall who was an early polar explorer and first to visit the north shore of Greenland. He was followed by Solomon Andree who tried to reach the North Pole in a hot air balloon. Fridtjof Nansen of Norway also aimed for the north and sailed into the Arctic Ocean aboard his ship, The Fram in 1893. But Fram got stuck in the pack ice for two years and despite his failure Nansen did reach further north than anyone else at that time and is to this day a hero in Norway and the world.

The race to the North Pole was finally won by American Robert Peary and Matthew Henson in April 1909 although their achievements would remain mired in controversy for years to come but now, they are considered to be genuine. But the impact of this announcement was huge. Norwegian Roald Amundsen had wanted to be the first to reach the North Pole all his life. Upon hearing that the pole had been ‘conquered’ he set his sights on the unconquered South Pole (but he kept his Southern ambitions guarded). And so began the greatest race in the history of exploration between Amundsen and Captain Robert Scott, an explorer from England. This was a race between two obsessed men backed by two competing nations. Amundsen took Scott and England by surprise when he arrived on the Antarctica coast and won the race since his goal was just to reach the pole whereas Scott had scientific objectives, too. On 14 December 1911, Amundsen reached the South Pole first as his party was better prepared for the hostile weather. They had taken huskies instead of Siberian ponies that Scott’s team chose. However, the real tragedy was that Scott did manage to reach the pole too on 17 January 1912 but just to see the Norwegian flag planted on it. Dejected is an understatement and Scott and his entire crew died on the return journey to the coast. All this would not have happened if the North Pole had not been reached by the Americans two years earlier and England would finally have their exploration moment in the ‘Sun’.

But while Amundsen was the first and Scott the second, many consider Ernest Shackleton of Britain as the greatest Antarctica explorer. Like Livingstone, he never achieved any of his polar objectives, one of which was to reach the South Pole in 1908 (he was just 180 kilometres short) and the other was to cross Antarctica coast to coast in 1915 (ship got stuck in ice). But what he did was that he saw Antarctica more than any other explorer and when his ship, The Endurance, was stuck in ice for almost two years, he rescued his entire team. Not a single man died under Shackleton’s watch and such a clean sheet was unheard of back in the days of these heroic polar expeditions.

Highest- Lowest Points on Earth and Rocketing into Space

The highest point on Earth as we all know is the Mt Everest peak in the Himalayas on the border of Nepal and China. It towers above all else at 8,849 metres or 8.8 kilometres, reaching the upper troposphere and almost the stratosphere itself where our planes fly when cruising at full altitude. In the early 20^th century, many strong young men wanted to step on the ‘top of the world’ and one of the first greats to attempt this (and die) was George Mallory along with his partner Andrew Irvine. Just a few weeks ago, Irwin’s body was found very close to the summit and it is one of the great mysteries as to whether the mountain duo ever summited Everest in 1924 or not. In any case, the men who are credited with the first confirmed successful summiting are Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, nearly three decades after Mallory.

On the other extreme is Earth’s deepest point called ‘Challenger Deep’ and it is as low as 10,935 metres or 10.9 kilometres below sea level. It rests in a part of the Pacific called the Mariana Trench off the east coast of the Philippines. In 1960 Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh took their custom made bathyscaphe (manned submersible) named ‘Trieste’ to the unfathomable depths of the deepest abyss. To exactly understand how big their achievement was and what kind of risks they took (with water pressure that could crush them in milliseconds) it wouldn’t be another six decades before the second successful descent to the ‘Challenger Deep’ floor. This time explorer and movie director of the Titanic, James Cameroon took his submersible to the deepest darkness in 2012.

After these extremities were reached by 1960, the decade to follow was all about space. And it was a race too – this time between post-World War II nuclear superpowers of USSR and USA. USSR dealt the first big blow and got their man, Yuri Gagarin in space in 1961 but, 8 years later, fully backed by President John F Kennedy, three astronauts (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collin) went on their Apollo 11 lunar mission. On 20 July 1969 Neil Armstrong was the first man to place his foot on the Moon’s surface and Buzz followed to become the second man on the Moon, while Collin stayed back in lunar orbit as planned. Of the three, Buzz is still alive today at 94.

As of February 2024, 644 people have crossed the Karman Line (100-kilometres up) which marks the imaginary boundary of space and just 12 have landed on the lunar surface. The count for Mars is of course zero, but Elon Musk and SpaceX are eager to get the score ticking by being the first to send a human to the red planet.

The Modern Explorer

The modern land explorer has two challenges to contend with. On the one hand, all major, well known geographical extremities have been reached and explored (some extensively, some moderately) and, on the other, the explorer lives in a world of 8 billion people with most having access to the internet and the lure of the omnipresent media. This has resulted in a seemingly endless supply of people wanting to break new ground and in order to be noticed and funded, they need to be creative about their records.

But there are still some classic old-school explorers and one such is Sir Ranulph Fiennes, often called the ‘world’s greatest living explorer’. He is the first man ever to do a surface based circumnavigation of the world via both the north and south poles and has also discovered a lost city in Oman without using satellite aid. Fiennes is a desert specialist and has written two classic books on it – ‘Heat’ and ‘Cold’. There is Mike Horn, too, who has been the mental coach of the world cup winning India Cricket & German Football squads and has achieved the first ever non-motorised solo circumnavigation of the Earth via the Equator. If fact, along with Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland, he became the first man to reach the North Pole in the total darkness of winter. This story was covered in the National Geographic and was called the ‘boldest polar expedition of modern times’. It really takes that much (and more) to stand out in the 21^st century. It is winner-take-all in the ‘minefield’ of extreme exploration.

Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet, and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and in his early days, used to be a published poet as well. More than anything else, he loves his Himalayan home. Reach him at: www.facebook.com/MostTravelledIndian/ ; www.instagram.com/MostTravelled_Indian/