Interesting Trivia:

His Story:

Walter Herbert was three years old when his family moved to Egypt, from there they moved to South Africa.  His early years he spent surveying Cyprus and Egypt.

His first exciting experience walking over ice was when he was 12 years old.  He walked across the frozen river Severn.  His father punished him for doing that as the ice was barely thick enough to carry him, but for Herbert it was a seminal moment of "joyful discovery" about himself.

His interest in the Antarctic was sparked when, during a trip on a bus, a newspaper fell on his head from the luggage which revealed a vacancy for an expedition there. He took on the challenge and by age 26, had already spent five years on the continent.  He mapped the Queen Maud range (the nearest mountains to the South Pole), some 26,000 square miles. While he was there, he retraced the routes of Explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott on the Beardmore Glacier, and Roald Amundsen's through the spectacular ice falls of the Axel Heiberg. He was the first to retrace these explorers' traverses. Traveling with dog sledges, he became quite the expert and this got him a job with the New Zealand Antarctic programme which commissioned him to purchase dogs in Greenland for the Antarctic.

In 1962, at age 28, he believed there were no more major discoveries left to be made in Antarctica" and decided to try out the Arctic. He took the Inuit dogs that he had used already in Antarctica and lived with the Inuit and learned how to manage dogs on the ice-cap in the way they did.  In 1964 he then trekked the routes taken by Sverdrup and Cook from Greenland to Ellesmere Island in the Arctic.

Next, he planned to attempt crossing the Arctic Ocean (a journey of 3,800-miles) on foot, something that had never been tried before. It was an extreme hazardous and ambitious undertaking.  Even the Inuit thought he was crazy to attempt it. The journey is sheer impossible to map out as the constantly shifting ice and weather conditions (with temperatures of -30C) produce either unpredictable patterns of high pressure ridges or turn to mush incapable of supporting the weight of a single dog.  However, Herbert was determined to make the journey, from Alaska to Spitsbergen, and in February 1968, they set out with dogs and sledges.  BBC director Richard Taylor, who filmed their departure, said Herbert was "extraordinarily determined".

He was not out to set a record of crossing at the fastest possible time.  He carefully choose his team (they were four in total) and planned to over-winter in a camp and let the ice itself carry him further across, before completing his journey the following summer. Sixteen months later, having often walked through nights lit by the Aurora Borealis, they crossed some of the last, and most treacherous, ice-floes to reach Spitzbergen in northern Norway, 1,500 miles away. Their feat was recognised by the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, as "a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history", and which Prince Philip stated "ranks among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance".

But just completing this journey as a feat of endurance was not enough for Herbert’s team.  While on route, Fritz Koerner, one of the expedition members, systematically recorded the depth of the ice-cap, providing a set of measurements which remain the standard against which the health of the Arctic has been tested ever since. In recent years, as the shrinkage of the ice has accelerated, those unique measurements of the whole span of the icecap have assumed an even greater significance.

Unfortunately, problems with his organising committee (the Royal Geographical Society) who thought Herbert to be too stubborn and argumentative complicated the journey.  They had to arrange several air-drops, and the strain became apparent when one of the team members, Allan Gill was injured and Herbert insisted that he stayed on while the Committee wanted him airlifted off.  The four expedition members, with completely different characters, worked well together under Herbert’s management. The consequence of his problems with the Committee was that they turned against him and the success of his mission was not publicised.  All in all, the world’s attention had shifted to the space program and when a few weeks later Neil Armstrong made his first steps on the moon and spoke his famous words, Herbert’s feat was forgotten.

It was not the last bold project Herbert undertook.  He attempted to circumnavigate Greenland in 1978 by dog sled and a traditional boat, called an “umiak”. The planned 16 months journey was to cover the 13,000 km but the extreme bad weather conditions made it impossible.

In a sense, Herbert “wrote” double history when the National Geographic Society approached him when they wanted a biography written of the American hero Robert Peary (the American credited with being the first to the North Pole in 1909) whom they had sponsored on that expedition. Herbert had long been an admirer of Peary and as such he was the natural choice for the NGS. However, they did not really get what they asked for; Herbert, while doing research for the book, came to realise that Peary must have falsified his records, and that he had not reached the Pole at all; the speed he claimed of almost 100 kilometres a day across the ice was simply impossible, and there were further incongruities about the record-keeping. He felt, after great soul-searching, that he had to reveal the truth.

His book “The Noose of Laurels” published in 1989, sparked quite some discussions and uproar, but there was a growing consensus from other polar explorers that Herbert was right. More interestingly, what this meant was that Herbert's team, in retrospect, had been the first to reach the North Pole on foot. For they had passed through it while crossing the Arctic, even stopping as a homage to Peary and getting a fix on the elusive pole beneath the shifting ice, an experience Wally described in a typically poetic phrase as "trying to step on the shadow of a bird that was circling overhead".

This revelation triggered a new storm, mostly from across the Atlantic, which Herbert bore with great dignity.  When things became too much he turned to his painting which gave him great spiritual solace.  When personal tragedy struck (his daughter Pascale was killed in a freak accident, he increasingly turned to painting.

Herbert was an extraordinary man, a bit brusque as a young man, but whose life changed when he made the 1968 crossing, although it took him years of reflection to realise that.  He and his family had lived in Greenland with the Inuit where he developed an interest in the spiritual call of the wilderness.  His wife Marie, who also is an accomplished writer, shared his interests and loves and followed him on his journeys to Greenland and Lapland.

What brought him many admirers were not only his accomplishments, but what he drew from these experiences in the wilderness.  He hated the “sporting approach” of expeditions and believed this was best left to adventurers.  What he believed was important and had done himself was that the true explorer should spend as much time in the polar regions as possible, even over- wintering to draw out the best from them.  He learned much from the Inuit when he immersed himself deeply in their culture. Commercial pressure was something he resisted as he believed they distorted the values he held; he was immensely spiritual and practical at one and the same time.

Books he wrote:

• The Polar World, Wally Herbert, 2007
• The Noose of Laurels, Wally Herbert, 1989
• Polar Deserts, Wally Herbert
• Hunters of the Polar North, Wally Herbert
• Eskimos, Wally Herbert
• North Pole, Wally Herbert
• Across the Top of the World, Wally Herbert
• A World of Men, Wally Herbert