TWO

Edgeøya

IN CHOOSING HIS own objective for an expedition, Gino followed Wordie’s lead. In 1919 and 1920 his Cambridge mentor had co-led small ventures to Svalbard, an archipelago of four major islands situated well to the north of Norway, between latitudes 76 and 81. Never prehistorically inhabited, Svalbard was visited in 1596 by the Dutch explorer Willem Barents, who had sailed blind into the high latitudes in search of that elusive shortcut to China, the Northeast Passage. Because the waters off Svalbard were incredibly rich in whales, Barents’s discovery unleashed a frenzy, lasting more than three centuries, of ruthless killing of the great ocean mammals, as well as the slaughter of walruses, seals, and polar bears. Entrepreneurs from Russia, the Netherlands, Britain, Norway, Sweden, and America descended on Svalbard in a free-for-all of marine exploitation.

Nearly all that activity took place around Spitsbergen, the largest of the four islands, whose shores are bathed by the Gulf Stream, which surges north off its west coast. The east coast of Svalbard, on the other hand, is battered by a relentless flow of polar ice pack pushing south, rendering the other three islands—Nordaustlandet, Barentsøya, and Edgeøya—inaccessible by ship for eleven months of the year, open only during a window from mid-August into early September. Some years that window never opens.

Gino decided to explore Edgeøya, the southeast corner of the archipelago. The island, seventy miles long by forty-five wide, had been discovered in 1616 by a shadowy merchant sailor from Lancashire named Thomas Edge. But through the centuries, thanks to its difficulty of access, Edgeøya had been neglected almost entirely by the hunters of whales and walruses.

A single Russo-Swedish team from 1899 to 1901 had accomplished a perfunctory survey of Edgeøya’s west coast. The rest of the island remained unmapped and unknown. No party had yet pushed into the interior, thought to be covered by a sprawling ice cap.

Yet in the spring of 1927, Gino faced a formidable challenge. In three months, he needed to raise funds, lease a ship, buy and transport tons of gear and food, and recruit a team for his expedition. Before that season, Gino had scarcely organized anything more complicated than a family ski outing to Switzerland. He was not a joiner, much less a leader. With his pals Quintin Riley and Robert Lea, he had laughed his way through dreary Lancing. His first year at Cambridge had been marked by distractions, sudden escapes, and desultory scholarship.

That Gino had a gift not only for friendship but for persuasion would come to light during the next five years of his short life. Yet it remains a mystery how, during those frantic months of preparation, he put together a solid team of eight companions. Seven of them were Cambridge undergraduates or young alumni. The wild card in the crew was Henry Morshead, forty-four years old that spring, a longtime official with the Survey of India with extensive Himalayan experience. In 1921, on the first Everest expedition, Morshead had helped George Mallory pioneer the route to the elusive North Col, the key to all attempts from the Tibetan side for the next thirty years. Back on Everest the next year, Morshead reached 25,000 feet with Mallory, E. F. Norton, and Howard Somervell, a new record. He was generally acclaimed as one of the Himalayas’ great explorers: of Morshead, Norton swore, “I never met a harder man.”

But on that 1922 thrust, inadequately outfitted, Morshead suffered crippling frostbite of toes and hands, later having three fingers amputated. What convinced the forty-four-year-old veteran to join a twenty-year-old upstart on a junket to Svalbard five years later—perhaps Wordie’s intercession?—we can only speculate. But on Edgeøya, Morshead became Gino’s staunchest partner.

In a frenzy of fund-raising, Gino won pledges from a Cambridge fund and the Royal Geographical Society totaling £250, or $10,600 in 2022 American dollars. It was enough to lease a two-masted ship, the Heimen, and hire an old-fashioned Norwegian skipper named Lars Jacobsen. The nine-day voyage out of Tromsø featured the dubious sport of shooting polar bears from the ship as they lolled on ice floes, bouts of seasickness that laid almost all hands low (Gino would suffer exorbitantly from the malady throughout his life), and a storm that tore away the ship’s wireless aerial and flooded the belowdecks. Captain Jacobsen disdained the ship’s navigational instruments, preferring instead to climb to the crow’s nest and sail by dead reckoning. When Edgeøya at last came into sight, he was chagrined to find the ship not on the island’s west coast, but well to the east of it, amid loose ice pack.

To solve that glitch, he brilliantly piloted the Heimen through the seldom-traversed Freeman Strait between Barentsøya and Edgeøya, then down the west coast of the island. On July 31 the team made landfall at Keilhau Bay on the south coast, not far from where the Russo-Swedish team had launched its survey.

As soon as he set foot on land, Gino was afire with the urge to discover, charging off solo to climb the nearest high hill, topping out 2,000 feet above the sea. From that summit he gazed east to size up the unexplored interior. He was acutely aware of how little time the expedition had. The Heimen was scheduled to pick the men up at Cape Lee on the northwest corner of the island on August 20, barely three weeks hence. So Gino made the first order of business traversing Edgeøya from west to east, surveying as the men proceeded, then returning by a different route to cover as much new ground as possible. Ninety miles all told, which Gino hoped to cover in eight or ten days.

On August 1 he chose four men to join him on the traverse. In the time-honored tradition of Scott and Shackleton, they would man-haul a sledge with all their gear and rations packed on top of it.

From the start, the trek could hardly have gone worse. Gino had reconnoitered the first several miles the day before, realizing at once that sledging would be impossible until the team reached permanent ice. So on August 1 the five men backpacked all their baggage, dragging and carrying the empty sledge, until they got to a glacier that spilled from the central ice cap. Yet even there, the sledging was nasty, on bare ice riven with glacial streams. The day had started fine and clear, but by evening a heavy fog descended. Only partway up the glacier, the team stopped to camp.

The fog stayed thick and low to the ground for the next ten days. Morale plunged with each wasted day. To save weight, the men had brought along no books. A couple of them filled the silences with singing. Years later, Gino could recite on harmonica the South American ditties that team member V. S. Forbes had warbled inside the tent.

During fugitive clearings, the men moved their camp a hundred yards or so, and climbed to nearby summits to survey with plane table, only “to sit shivering and straining their eyes for the points they could not see.” Despite the maddening halt the fog had carved out of the team’s tight schedule, the five men apparently got along well with one another. And this raises for the first time one of the deepest puzzles built into the genius of Gino Watkins. How did he lead?

How did a twenty-year-old on his first expedition mold the efforts of eight companions, all older than himself, one with decades of experience in the Himalayas, into a coherent team? Shackleton and Scott wielded the authority of their leadership through force of example, but also through institutional hierarchy. Trained in the Royal Navy, Scott so rigidly enforced his discipline that throughout both his long expeditions, the daily messes his teams sat down to on shipboard and in hut were segregated by “officers” and “men,” with different meals.

Gino never gave orders as Scott, Shackleton, or even the more egalitarian Amundsen and Nansen, had. Yet on all four of his expeditions, not a single teammate ever sabotaged a plan, much less threatened mutiny. One insight into Gino’s leadership style comes in a conundrum offered by Forbes after the Edgeøya journey. “The most extraordinary thing,” he said, “was that Gino gave no orders in the ordinary sense and we all thought we were doing exactly what we wanted to do. But afterwards we realised that we had done precisely what he meant us to do.”

After a couple of days, Gino went ahead with Morshead to try at least to reach the high point of the ice cap. They traveled light, leaving the sledge behind, carrying little food and no stove. But then they were stranded in a two-day blizzard.

They gave up on the traverse on August 11, and all five men straggled back to the southwest coast, reaching Keilhau Bay on the twelfth. The expedition was half over, and the team had accomplished almost nothing. Of the forty-five miles of wilderness stretching from west coast to east, the men, wrestling with their finicky sledge and humping loads in their rucksacks, had covered barely twelve.

Gino’s response to the setback was to redouble the challenge: his men would now try to traverse Edgeøya the long way, seventy miles from south to north. With only two companions, carrying only a small tent and eight days of food, ditching the sledge, he set out on August 13. The rest of the party, under Morshead’s leadership, would sail north on the Heimen and meet the traversers at Cape Lee.

The trio quickly regained the glacier, but on the ice cap itself they were stymied by fog and twelve-inch-deep slush. After a poor first day’s travel, though, they hit their stride, averaging twenty miles a day. In the middle of the ice cap, they made a startling discovery. Crossing a glacial col, they saw ahead of them not more unbroken ice cap, but an open, fertile valley, “an oasis of quite luxuriant vegetation among the barren glaciers and snow domes which rose on three sides of it.”

In one stroke the trio had discovered that the center of Edgeøya was not sheathed in uniform ice cap, but rather in patches and lobes of thick ice interspersed with small open basins. (Even today, geographers struggle to explain the oddities of Edgeøya’s interior.)

Descending into the oasis, the men stumbled upon a herd of reindeer. Animals that had never before encountered humans, they were slow to scare. Forbes tied a discarded pair of antlers to his head and crept within twenty yards of the reindeer before they skittered away, only to stop and stare back from fifty yards.

Curiously, though they had seen numerous polar bears on ice floes on the cruise between Tromsø and Edgeøya, they encountered not a single one on their traverse. This despite the fact that, then as now, Edgeøya is a migratory corridor for polar bears, one of the most densely traveled in the Arctic.

On August 16 the men realized that they could easily finish the south-to-north traverse of the island in only five days, rather than the eight they had budgeted for it. But on that day, still twenty miles from Cape Lee, they heard voices. It was Morshead and a teammate, out surveying from their base at the cape, where the Heimen waited to pick up the team and sail for Norway. After the joyous reunion, Gino’s trio joined their teammates in their camp only six miles inland.

There was no getting around it: the expedition was now an unqualified success. Three men had traversed Edgeøya the long way, discovering the essential features of the interior: an unknown upland that had thwarted exploration throughout the previous three centuries.

But the men got to talking in camp that night, and Gino’s antic restlessness surfaced. Simply to head down to Cape Lee and call it a job well done seemed too easy. The lure of the unknown still raced in his blood, and after all the days of fog, the weather was holding glorious. To trudge down to Cape Lee, crossing land Morshead had already surveyed, seemed “a waste of time.”

So that evening in camp Gino devised Plan B, a spontaneous extension of the journey just to eke out one more discovery. Instead of heading down to Cape Lee and the ship, Gino persuaded Morshead and Forbes to head northeast with him across yet more terra incognita, aiming for Cape Heuglin, the extreme northeast point on Edgeøya at the entrance to Freeman Strait. That jaunt would add another forty miles to the roster of exploration.

In his fits of manic ambition, Gino could be cavalier or even oblivious to the needs of others. As the men separated on the morning of August 17, Gino told the other two to return to the ship and instruct Captain Jacobsen to load up and head back east through Freeman Strait. The rendezvous at Cape Heuglin would take place, Gino decreed, by midnight on August 21. One can imagine Jacobsen’s annoyance at being ordered on this uncertain and perilous mission by a twenty-year-old in absentia.

Of course, as soon as Gino’s trio started out on their new jaunt, the weather turned bad. The men advanced only a few miles the first day; the second, none at all, as they hunkered through a storm in their cramped tent. Suddenly five days to cover forty miles looked like anything but a piece of cake. But with the mist clearing on the morning of August 19, Gino pushed his partners hard.

During the next few days, winter seemed to arrive early. The first night snow blew inside the tent, soaking the men’s sleeping bags. Paraffin leaked into the food in Forbes’s rucksack, ruining the biscuits. August 21 dawned so thick with fog that the men despaired of finding their way to Cape Heuglin. But since the ship was due at midnight, Gino decided to force the blind march down to the coast.

On that stagger north, Morshead collapsed. Forbes took much of the man’s load (Gino’s already being the heaviest), and the younger men tried to rally the veteran. “I was very afraid he would never get there,” wrote Gino in his diary, “as at every halt he just dropped down looking absolutely dead, and he could only get to his feet again with assistance.”

Out of the miasma, the shape of a hut gradually cohered. The men rushed on, imagining the crew holed up in it and the ship anchored nearby. But the hut was ruined, full of old bones and bits of parched skin left by some long-ago hunters, and the Heimen was nowhere in sight.

Midnight came and went. The men were almost out of food. During brief clearings of the fog, the men stared at the empty ocean. Even the sanguine Gino Watkins grew alarmed. In his diary, he wrote,

I really don’t know what has happened to [the ship]. I realize one thing for which I am to blame and that is that I am sure one ought always to carry a rifle, even if one has already got very heavy packs. If the Heimen has run aground and can’t get to us, if we had rifles we might manage to shoot enough reindeer and freeze them in to live through the winter. As it is we shall be bound to starve if she does not come. It is very disappointing.

All through August 22, the three exhausted men peered through the fog and waited, unable to get warm in their soaked clothes. In early afternoon, Gino and Forbes started to hike west along the coast, leaving Morshead in the tent by the ruined hut. And then, out of the murk, the vague shape of the Heimen coalesced.

That evening the famished trio gorged on roast goose, from a bird a teammate on the ship had shot the same day. Belowdecks the exhausted trio changed clothes and got warm. Captain Jacobsen turned the ship around and headed back west through Freeman Strait.

On August 30, the men spent their last night on the Heimen, docked in the Tromsø harbor. “We all sang songs,” reported Gino. “It was a very merry evening.”

* * *

Back at Cambridge for his third term, Gino once again neglected his studies as he feverishly put his notes in order, developed photographs, and wrote up the data his “scientists” had compiled, all in preparation for the lecture he would give at the Royal Geographic Society in February.

By the fall of 1927, Gino’s family was reduced to a straitened existence. In the house on Onslow Crescent, Gino’s mother struggled with her finances, as Gino’s sister and younger brother, still at home, completed the ménage. Gone were the servants, though the ever-loyal Nanny Dennis kept the household from falling apart.

About a year earlier, Gino’s father had contracted tuberculosis. Having squandered most of the inheritance that had once supported the lavish life of Eaton Place, the Colonel chose not to return to England, but to install himself in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where he would while out his remaining days. He had, in effect, absconded from his own family.

On February 20, 1928, in the august Aeolian Hall at the RGS, Gino stood up before 500 fellows to deliver his account of the Edgeøya expedition. If he was nervous in front of such a gathering, he hid it well. His charm, his youthful good looks, his modesty, and a few flashes of his dry wit soon won over even the crustiest of the old walruses in attendance.

Gino’s mother was in the audience. Afterward she wrote her husband to replay the momentous evening.

I felt in a ghastly condition of nerves, and as the hall got fuller and fuller I got iller and iller! Amid much clapping . . . Gino stepped onto the platform. Gino looking about sixteen, very pale and quiet. . . . 

He began at once, very quietly and modestly and rather too quickly, but he gradually settled down to a very easy pleasant style and was quite excellent—made one or two jokes which were laughed at heartily. . . . 

He received an ovation at the end and I can’t tell you how many ripping things were said about him.

The talk had been a complete success. At the end of the ceremony, the RGS president, Sir Charles Close, announced that Gino had been elected as a fellow of the society. But there was a technical problem. He was too young to become a fellow. Then and there, the RGS amended its bylaws and voted Gino in. He thus became the youngest fellow in the ninety-eight-year history of the institution.

Teammates, friends, and Gino’s mother repaired to supper at the Savoy. The dancing wound on until 2:00 a.m. The next morning, friend after friend rang up Mrs. Watkins “to say that you are a damned lucky woman.” In the letter to Gino’s father, she added, “I wish you could have been [there] last night.”

By February Gino was deeply immersed in the planning for his next expedition. Already the RGS had agreed to sponsor it.

A few weeks after the celebration in Aeolian Hall, Gino’s mother rose early and took a train to Eastbourne on the south coast. From the station she hired a taxi to drive her out to Beachy Head, the great chalk cliff overlooking the sea. Then she disappeared. It was presumed that she walked to the edge and jumped. Her body was never found.