Books
Ice Tracks: Today's Heroic Age of Polar Adventure
Ice Tracks: Today’s Heroic Age of Polar Adventure (the name we eventually gave our travel company) gave me the opportunity to travel and interview eighteen polar adventurers, some whose extraordinary records stand today.
What fascinated me most as to why these men and women wanted to put themselves through extreme danger and near death experiences.
I discovered that the isolation during their solo and unsupported expeditions became akin to a spiritual awakening.
Thus it was with Henry Worsley who in 2016 died as a result of crossing Antarctica solo and unsupported. By then we were the closest of friends. With all the best laid plans, he pushed the limits and combined with a strike of bad luck, he paid a price of which the subjects in my book never lost sight.
Shackleton's Critic
On 9 January 1909, Eric Stewart Marshall joined Ernest Shackleton, Frank Wild and Jameson Adams in raising the Union Jack high on the desolate Antarctic Plateau, farther south than any men had reached before.
A month and a half later, his individual heroics saved his three companions, who would otherwise have been doomed to icy graves.
Two years on, Marshall stood alone on a ridge deep in the interior of New Guinea, the first man from the Western world ever to see it.
But Marshall received neither fame nor fortune from these great achievements, and the man described by fellow explorer Raymond Priestley as having ‘the build and arrogance of the class rugger forward’ became ever more embittered. As time passed, much of Marshall’s spleen was directed at Shackleton.
Insight into Marshall is long overdue, and here we have the opportunity to read his yet unpublished diaries that includes the Southern Journey on the ’Nimrod’ 1907 expedition.
The Quest For Frank Wild
The Quest for Frank Wild tells the gripping story of my determination to unravel the truth of the final years of Frank Wild, one of the greatest British Edwardian Polar explorers of all time.
He supposedly died in penury unable to come to terms with Ernest Shackleton’s death and forgotten by his fellowmen in the small mining town of Klerksdorp near Johannesburg.
The little that was known of his later life in South Africa has been maligned by hearsay and sensational journalism and most tragically of all, no-one knew where he was buried. An outstanding man lost in life and in death.
I spent eight years to finally uncover an extraordinary untold story and by doing so not only fulfilled Wild’s wish to have his Memoirs published but ultimately I made an astonishing discovery.
The Memoirs stand alone as a unique account of Edwardian Polar exploration.
With Shackleton and Mawson - The Antarctic Diaries of Frank Wild
This book is not a biography but an insight into Edwardian polar exploration by Wild’s own writings.
As Sir Ernest Shackleton’s most trusted second in command, a man whose experience of Antarctica far outweighed that of Shackleton, Scott and Mawson, his Southern Journey diary, seen here for the first time strikes a formidable comparison to Marshall’s diary of the same journey that is also in the public realm for the first time in Shackleton’s Critic.
