>>Ranulph Fiennes: A very good morning to
you.
I've got 20 minutes to do what normally takes
55 minutes so I'll talk quite quickly.
I'm sorry about that.
I was in the British Army there for five years
in Germany in the Cold War, and all we learned
was how to retreat from the German border
in tanks.
So I got bored and joined the Sultan's Army
at a time when world Marxism was doing very
well, and so I joined the Army.
This is the Sultan's Navy back then.
That's his Army.
This was my reconnaissance platoon.
There were about 60 of us.
I had learned Arabic in Beaconsfield, and
so we were able to communicate.
This is the Sultan's Air Force, or one-half
of it, photographed obviously from the other
half.
If you look carefully, the team consisted
of people from Oman, Zanzibar, Balochistan,
and myself, European.
All of us were, of course, Muslim.
I was a Muslim for the three years I was out
there.
There were about 3,000 members of the people's
front on the opposition.
There were only 180 of us in the Army.
So I learned to be flexible by never moving
in an easy target like a Land Rover, so we
only moved by night for three years out there.
But I had to leave the Sultan's Army, unfortunately.
We, over the three years, were the only Army
patrol on the total Saudi, Yemeni, Omani border.
It was a great time, but if you went too many
times on the same track, they would put mines
which would blow a Land Rover over a hundred
meters and the people further than that.
So you learned to be alert.
I was thrown out of the British Army because
I had failed to get A-levels at school, so
I couldn't go to Sandhurst, like the American
West Point, and so when I was thrown out of
the Army purely because of the lack of A-levels,
I was 24 years old and my career was behind
me.
So I got married at the time, and my wife
decided what we could do to make a living
was to do what I'd been doing in the Army,
teaching soldiers how to climb and ski in
Germany, in order to stop them beating each
other up in the canteen, which they did because
they were very bored because the Soviet Army
never bothered to attack.
Now, the -- that was paid for by the taxpayer
in the Army, but now, my wife and I had to
start a new career with nothing, no money
whatsoever.
So we started to think "Let's do big projects,
beyond anything other people had done."
So back in 1968, we did the first ever journey
up the longest river in the world, which is
the Nile at 4,000 miles.
We decided to use a new thing called a hovercraft.
They were two-seaters.
They could lift three centimeters above the
surface.
We took nine months to complete the Nile because
there were a lot of four-centimeter obstacles.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We moved to all sorts of
different projects, maybe 12 big expeditions
all over the world.
This one was at the invitation of the British
Colombian government, which is -- they had
a centennial.
They had only been a Canadian province for
100 years, so they asked us, as a Scottish
unit, because of all the explorers who discovered
it had been Scots, to do the first-ever journey
from their Yukon border 3 1/2 thousand miles
down the Rocky Mountain rivers, the roughest
in the world, to the United States border
at Vancouver.
We took quite a long time to do that.
I used people from the Army that had three
weeks leave.
We took eight months, so they were not popular
when they got back.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: This particular rapid,
Hell's Gate, some of you may know it if you
come from Canada.
We had four boats, three people in each boat.
That one went the wrong way and got turned
over and we found their bodies three miles
downstream, which could have stopped the entire
expedition, but luckily that was just the
BBC film crew.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: Round about I think 1975,
we had a problem, because in our industry,
if you call it that, fashion changed, and
whatever you're in, you got to respond quickly.
And my boss, my literary agent in New York,
decided that we must stop doing hot expeditions
because the fashion was to do only cold polar
ones.
So my wife decided we must start ambitiously
in the polar world by doing the first ever
journey vertically around Earth's surface
without flying one meter of the 52,000 miles.
So I was sent to a library by her to find
the best route, and I quickly discovered that
at the bottom there was a place called Antarctic,
far bigger than China and India stuffed together,
but with no Tescos on route.
Now, nobody had ever crossed it from side
to side.
I'm talking about the world's experts.
So we had only spent a winter in Scotland,
so we didn't stand much chance.
Up at the top, I found there was another obstacle
called the Arctic Ocean, 2,000 miles of it,
which also had never been crossed by experts.
So I went home, as you would, and I told my
wife it was a stupid idea.
She became quite unpleasant, so I therefore
went back to the library.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: You have -- you have to
be first.
If you're second, you won't get sponsorship
and we depend upon sponsorship.
We knew that the great American explorer at
that time, Walt Pederson, was after being
first to both poles -- didn't want to go the
whole way around -- so we were in a hurry.
But we worked every day, every week, for seven
years unpaid in order to raise 1900 sponsors
from all over the world, including a 40-year-old
ship.
We found a team of 52 people who gave up pretty
much their lives, as it turned out, for eight
years unpaid to join us.
We had to have a ship to drop us off over
a three-year period, because that was how
long it would take to do the first and only
journey around Earth's polar surface.
We arrived at Antarctic seven years after
we started work on it.
We were unloaded by the ship's crew, all volunteers.
They said goodbye, went round the other side
to the Pacific below New Zealand to wait,
in case our group of three managed to do the
first crossing of Antarctica.
The problem was, you can't just arrive there
and cross because it gets dark, it goes down
to minus 122 degrees centigrade -- that's
up at 7,000 feet above sea level -- where
we would have to spend eight months.
Because we needed a light house -- a light,
not heavy one -- my wife designed one in Wales
out of paper, which you could paint to make
it harder.
It could withstand minus 30 degrees and winds
of 40 miles an hour.
That winter, we had 160-mile-an-hour winds
so you might think we would be flattened and
cold.
But because the snow was designed to drift
up to the roof, giving us insulation and protection,
but then of course you could not get out.
You might think, well, why would you want
to?
Well, we were cooking with gasoline in a paper
house, so getting out was important.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We -- eventually, the sun
came back after eight months, the thermometer
rose to minus 68, so we left the base leader
-- in those days, no GPS, so Morse code communications,
no sat phone.
We left the base commander.
That is the nastiest job, so I gave it to
my wife Ginny because the whole thing had
been her fault for thinking of it.
But she was a little person and could not
roll 45-gallon drums about in the snow so
a man had to be living with my wife for three
years.
So I did not want somebody who was physically
attractive in that position, but luckily,
we found a Yorkshireman for that particular
job.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We did the first-ever crossing
of 900 miles.
No human being had been there before.
Nobody knew how high it was.
There were no polar orbiting satellites.
We mapped an area bigger than France, probably
the last time a terrestrial map was made before
polar satellites made that sort of thing redundant.
We eventually reached the other side of the
world.
You know you're there because there's only
one active volcano on the Pacific coast.
From that point, we then carried on.
Ginny's plan, made nine years before off a
map in London, was to -- the ship would collect
us, which it did.
Two other ships were sunk in the ice down
there, but ours got through.
The people were still on board, still unpaid.
Two of them were dead but the rest were still
there.
They moved up the Greenwich Meridian, past,
as you can see on the map, Australia, Los
Angeles, Vancouver, through the Baring Straits,
which are just up there.
That is the Greenwich Meridian which was what
we were more or less following.
500 miles north of Alaska up in the ocean
is the North Pole and all the ice, 3 million-ton
ice floes move at 3 miles an hour, and when
they hit, they will sink your ship.
Therefore, when she made the plan, she decided
the ship would drop the three of us in the
land group off in rubber boats at the mouth
of the Yukon river.
We would then go 1200 miles up the Yukon on
the McKenzie River going north for 800 miles,
and then we would switch from the rubber boats
-- by now there are only two of us, not three
-- into a 15-foot Boston whaler which was
open to go through the Northwest Passage.
It was the first time any human being had
been through the Northwest Passage in a single
season.
From the North Pole, all this ice comes down,
even in midsummer, against the north Canadian
coast, which is where the passage is.
We were very lucky.
We managed to get through it.
Seven days and nights with no stopping.
But the boat at that point froze in.
The sea froze.
So boats become useless.
So we had 400 miles still to go, which had
he hadn't planned for, so you have to be flexible.
We had skis with us, so on the second day,
unfortunately, the other bloke, Charlie Burton,
a South African guy, his skis broke, which
is extremely irritating, which I told him,
which was not --
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: -- not a good idea, because
mine broke shortly after that.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: You must always have belt
and braces.
If your skis break, you've got to have snowshoes.
Unfortunately, he got fungus.
The skin fell off one of his feet.
He then got hemorrhoids.
He then fell over and cracked his head on
a crack and his eyes filled up with blood
and he started to complain.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: He basically -- we then
spent eight months up in the north waiting
for the dark period to go.
One month before the sun came back at that
latitude, we said goodbye to Ginny and the
two huts, and a week after we left, one of
them where all the parachutes were stored
for the eight-month attempt to cross the Arctic
by the North Pole caught fire.
She tried to put the fire out and did a bad
job, as you can see, sent a Morse code message.
We were 200 miles away out on the ice by then
in the dark.
All the pictures I took in the dark came out
black, so there's no point showing them.
But that is what it did look like in the darkness.
You can see steam there.
Basically, that is minus 60.
You do not expect open water, but there's
so much movement from the current and the
wind, that it's a nasty place to be in the
dark, because you can tread on sludge and
then it goes over your head.
That was a nasty bit, but we did reach the
North Pole and became the first human beings
in history to reach both poles.
We put a flag there, because people do, but
it's pretty stupid because within one hour,
that flag is half a mile from the pole because
the ice is sort of floating.
If you go there and you want to put your flag
there, dig a hole in the ice, swim down 17,000
feet to the seabed, put your flag there, and
it will stay put.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We did not do that.
At that particular point, we knew that we
wanted to go to Greenwich which was south
on the campus, but unfortunately so was every
other potential destination in the world.
So this caused hostility between the two of
us at that point.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We only got 400 miles before
the annual breakup.
It's like a tsunami.
It's very noisy.
It's not good for imagination.
That's why we have ex-military people who
don't have imagination.
We sat on an ice floe which got smaller under
breakage for three months floating toward
Siberia.
We never got bored because Charlie, over on
the left there, had a solar panel which gave
us enough power to listen to the BBC world
service for two minutes every day if there
was reception.
And one particular day with his headsets on
Charlie said, "The United Kingdom is at war."
I said, "Who with?"
And he said, "I didn't get that bit."
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We sat for five days of
bad radio reception arguing who the hell it
could be.
We knew that Mrs. Thatcher was aggressive,
but we couldn't work out who with.
We assumed it was France but we had no proof.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: When they said it was Argentina,
we thought that was just a stupid BBC joke.
We also did not get so bored because we got
visited over the three months.
They weight one and a half tons.
Up there, they are very hungry because they
kill near land.
They will go for you.
You smell of hot blood, and when you are attacked
in that area by a bear, the best thing you
can do, really, is shoot it.
If you do that, you will be put in prison
immediately by the Canadian police.
Or you would if there were any up there.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: The rules before you leave
Canada, you do not open fire unless they attack
you from ten meters.
That's going to be too late for you.
Even then, you are not allowed to shoot unless
their body language is aggressive.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: How do you know?
On page 80 it explains that an aggressive
bear's tail will always be at 45 degrees to
the ground.
But when they attack you you cannot see their
tail.
They also explained that only 10% eat humans
but you can't ask them which percentage they
belong to.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We had -- Eight years before
we designed canoes with skis in case this
happened.
Our floe was deteriorating.
The ship came up from Europe to try and rescue
us.
They got stuck, and began to sink.
Two months later, by which time we were really
panicking, they got stuck only 18 miles away
so we managed to reach them.
I don't know if you can see but if you look
carefully just over there, that's us.
When we arrived on the ship after eight months
out on the floating ice, humans had been around
Earth's surface for the first time in history
by any route.
Nobody has ever done it again.
Only two people have ever been around Earth's
surface.
More people have actually been on the moon.
We kept our team together and throughout the
1980s and '90s, using aerospace technology,
we beat all our rivals, including the Norwegians,
to the world records north and south.
We used amphibious equipment which weighed
nothing apart from a paddle to go through
Shugo (phonetic), which had previously been
impossible.
We used political lateral thought because
Gorbachev in 1992 said glasnost.
I wrote, "Dear Mr. Gorbachev, Can I do the
first expedition from Siberia," not from North
America, from Cape Arktikisky.
It's the best place to set out from, but it
was a missile site, secret missile site, so
I had to sign a contract that whilst there
I would take no photos.
I did not.
The other members of the team did.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: We broke the world records
from Russia for the next nine years, but unfortunately,
over in Arabia, over that period I had spent
eight big expeditions in vehicles looking
for the lost city in the greatest desert in
the world, the Rub' al Khali Empty Quarter,
and I was just about to find it in 1992 when,
unfortunately, NASA, that's Pasadena, California,
the jet propulsion laboratory, they put cameras
on the shuttle, and from 170 kilometers in
space they take pictures.
That is the Empty Quarter desert.
Between each brown line of dunes you've got
50 miles.
That's 80 kilometers.
That is a NASA professor.
If you look at that map and you are looking
for lost cities like I was but without the
shuttle, you can identify a lost city 30 feet
under the sand.
It becomes obvious by looking at a NASA photograph
with bioptics.
It's a system -- well, it's really cheating.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: They identified the lost
city out there because it was all right angles,
and they assumed that people make things with
right angles.
But actually, when my archeologist got out
there where we found the lost city, he said
this is not made by man.
It's made by God using right angles in order
to fool NASA.
So we -- Just to finish up with, I'm going
to mention an expedition in the mid '90s.
We were doing it because we heard that our
main rivals from Norway were about to do it
so we switched what we were doing and planned
to do the first unsupported crossing of Antarctica.
Those were the four expeditions by then that
had crossed Antarctica, including the blue
line which was our transglobe expedition.
The red line was the American Steiger.
The yellow line was the world's greatest climber,
Reinhold Messner from Italy, together with
Germany's top man, Arved Fuchs.
And lastly, the green line was in the 1950s
led by Sir Edmund Hillary, who previously
climbed Everest, and Dr. Fuchs, the top European
polar man.
But all four of us had used air support.
Now in the '90s we're talking about doing
it without any form of support at all.
There are crevasses.
That was the Hillary-Fuchs expedition.
Some of them are 300 feet deep.
You don't want to fall into them if you want
the expedition to succeed.
We arrived our team at the start point.
That is where the Atlantic ocean hits Antarctica's
coast.
The ski plane dropped us off and said goodbye.
They'd see us again in 2,000 miles time.
Everything you carry on day one must last
you for 2,000 miles.
We towed 500 pounds each.
That's a thousand pounds between two people.
The other guy with me is Europe's top physiologist.
He specializes in studying the effects of
starvation on the human body and muscle cannibalization.
So he was in his element in this expedition.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: He monitored our output
as eight and a half thousand calories every
day for 97 days with no rest day.
We could only carry 5,000, so we had a daily
deficiency for 97 days of three and a half
thousand calories.
I set out at 15 and a half stone.
By the halfway I was under nine stone.
We were skeletal.
This is even Weight Watchers with not recommend
this method.
Our feet were not good because towing that
weight effects your toes.
Your lips also are damaged because of the
ozone hole which is right ahead.
At fortnight, all the scabs, when you go to
sleep, stick together.
You wake up in the morning, you must say good
morning to the other bloke.
It's called team dynamics.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: But you cannot, because
your lips are all scabbed together so you
prod it.
And then you're sharing porridge out of a
communal bowl out of breakfast so all your
blood goes in his porridge which causes bad
relations.
Navigation, you don't need to be very clever
to work out the time on that man's watch.
Okay?
He is heading for the South Pole.
He is treading on his shadow.
The sun is due north at midday, so it's got
to be midday on his watch.
So an hour later, this is how we navigated,
I am going to say there is my shadow.
It's 1 o'clock.
The sun moves 15 degrees an hour, so I am
going to go 15 degrees to the right of the
shadow; 2 o'clock, 30 degrees.
And that was how you navigated until 1995
when the first polar orbiting satellites arrived
and GPS was possible.
Crevasses, you have well over 8,000 to cross.
You can't see them because they are covered
with snow normally until you have gone into
them by which time the information is too
late.
So I therefore developed a very careful policy,
which was to watch the bloke ahead.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: Nobody is going to fall
into that one.
There is a big hole up there that you can
see.
You can just see somebody up there.
We reached the pole at which point our Norwegian
competitors fell out, pretty much dead.
The only reason we carried on the other half
of the expedition was because my colleague
had a contract with Lancet Magazine, Europe's
top medical magazine, about advanced starvation.
And at the pole he'd measured our weight and
found that we were starving even more than
he had hoped and he was determined to complete
the article even if it was posthumous, so
we carried on.
I began to hate him.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: I'd done six expeditions
with him before.
The most difficult polar expedition of all
time which we're planning at the moment will
also be with him.
But I did hate him.
Every five days he took your blood for science.
Didn't have much blood left.
Every eight days he made you drink a container
of liquid costing a thousand dollars which,
for 24 hours after you drink it, any liquid
coming out of your body must be collected
for science, especially urine.
Now, at minus 90 average, peeing into a pee
bottle at minus 90 is lethal for that part
of your body if you are male, although, obviously,
at that sort of temperature, the difference
between males and females is not great.
[ Laughter ]
>>Ranulph Fiennes: His hands became very bad.
The blisters on top of your ski sticks in
the mitts get ice balls, so if you arrive
at the tent at night and shake your hand,
it sounds like castanets.
Then the blisters will fall off leaving raw
skin.
That's my hand about five years ago.
That was a result of me making a mistake for
about three minutes in 39 years.
You need to retain your focus totally at all
times on these trips.
We did eventually reach the other side of
Antarctica.
That is the Pacific ocean.
We were pretty much dead by then but we got
there, and had gone that little bit beyond
which any of our previous people had done.
It became and is today the longest polar unsupported
journey in history.
And we went on to many more expeditions.
But after 40 years of staying ahead of our
rivals, I would say that the one thing you
have to remember at all times is you will
not get sponsorship on which we depend without
staying ahead of your rivals at all times.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
