Book review: To the Ends of the Earth by Ranulph Fiennes

Ranulph Fiennes and his amazingly intrepid team became, in 1982, the first to navigate the globe in circumpolar fashion, passing through both ends of the polar axis over land. The book is a fascinating account of this labour of seven years.

Funnily enough, the best passage I found was not written by Fiennes himself. It is a comment made by HRH Prince Charles who supported the Transglobe Expedition.

`I think a great lesson  to be learned is that the power of nature is still immense and that it should remind us of our frailty as human beings, that we aren`t as great as we think we are, that out there still is something so much more powerful  than we are, even with our sophisticated technology and our ability to communicate to people so rapidly and create vast and deadlier weapons, that nature is even more deadly in many ways than we are, and we should respect that and recognise our place within the natural environment, because if we lose that,  I think we  lose touch with everything. `

And when you read of all Fiennes and his team faced, from reluctant sponsors, bureaucratic delays, drifting ice floes, constant elemental attacks on the body and mind, packed nilas (thick sludge ice) and impenetrable sastrugis (wave-like ridges of hardened ice),  marauding polar bears, windchill factors that can do a man in, you can well believe it.