THis from the Scottish Daily Express today - one of the great unsung Polar explorers :
THE doyen of polar explorers, and one of the few remaining links to that period of history known as the ’Heroic Age’ of polar exploration, died yesterday at the age of 72. Sir Wally Herbert, who lived in the village of Laggan in Badenoch, led the first team in history to reach the North Pole by surface travel without the assistance of airlifts.
He then continued this journey to complete the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean across its longest axis a feat that has never been repeated.
While everyone knows Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s team was the first to reach the South Pole, and New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepali Tenzing Norgay were the first to summit Mount Everest, few people realise it was British explorer Sir Wally who successfully claimed the North Pole for Britain.
Not only did Wally Herbert achieve this historical feat but he made a greater contribution than anyone to the surveying and mapping of Antarctica.
He also contributed greatly to understanding of the native Inuit of North-West Greenland.
Sir Wally had a mountain range and a plateau named after him in the Antarctic. The most northerly mountain in Svalbard was also named after him in the high Arctic. He was also a prize-winning author with nine books to his credit, and a gifted artist who has had one-man shows in London, Sydney and New York. Sir Wally was awarded the Polar Medal for his Antarctic Research (1960-62) and another Polar Medal for his crossing of the Arctic Ocean (1968-69); and Gold Medals by the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Scottish Geographical Society, as well as the Explorers Medal by the Explorers Club (New York). He was made a Knight Batchelor by HM The Queen on the last day of the old millennium, as one of the British ’icons’ of the 20th century.
As a polar traveller in particular his record is outstanding and totally unique. Modern adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes called him ’the greatest polar explorer of our time’ while the late Lord Shackleton described him as a ’phenomenon’ .
The Prince of Wales has dubbed him a man whose ’determination and courage’ were of truly heroic proportions’. In the new millennium, Sir Wally was knighted in recognition of his achievements.
During the course of his polar career - which spanned almost 50 years, Sir Wally spent 15 years in the wilderness regions of the polar world, and travelled with dog teams and open boats well over 25,000 miles - more than half of that distance through unexplored areas that no human being had set foot on before.
His 16-month journey in 1968/1969 from Alaska to Spitsbergen via the Pole of Inaccessibility and the North Pole was hailed by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, "as a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history", and an achievement, in the opinion Prince Philip, "which ranks among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance." Of the three last great geographical firsts - the trilogy of the first ascent of Mount Everest and the first surface crossing of the South and North Poles - the longest and most hazardous was the latter. It is significant, also that they reached the North Pole on the 6th of April 1969, the 60th anniversary of Peary’s claimed attainment of that same elusive spot. In the Antarctic in the late 1950s and early 60s Sir Wally mapped on foot some 45,000 square miles of new country, and came within only 200 miles of achieving his first great burning ambition of reaching the South Pole with sledges and dogs. Since then he had sledged several thousands of miles with some of the finest long-range hunters of the world’s most northerly Eskimo tribe; retraced the routes of some of the greatest polar explorers (Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen in the Antarctic - Peary, Sverdrup and Cook in the Arctic), and earned his own place in polar history with his epic 3,800 mile trek with three companions and forty dogs - the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean, which most historians now record as the last great journey on Earth. Sir Wally had a book scheduled for publication due out later this year called "The Polar World".
