I read Tim Severin’s obituary yesterday. One of his earliest expeditions was crossing the Atlantic in a currach made of wood and animal hides. When he made an unscheduled stop at Iceland almost all his crew deserted him. Severin had a reputation as a less kindly version of Captain Bligh.
The only one to stick by him was a boy in my year at Castle Park, Arthur Magan. If the name seems familiar it’s because he is a cousin of Lord Magan. George Magan’s love of the sea only extends to membership of the exclusive Royal Yacht Squadron. I doubt he would have got into a leaky sieve like the Brendan, even for a puff on a cigar and a bumper of brandy. But I digress. There are more eccentric British adventurers and explorers than you can shake a cleft stick at. Perhaps there is a glut of younger sons determined to prove themselves? Be that as it may, the expedition referred to yesterday was pretty epic.
The Taklamakan desert had been crossed from north to south, or vice versa I forget, by explorers like Auriel Stein, to whom I paid homage at his grave in Kabul in 2008. It had not been traversed from west to east, some 800 miles across high dunes in sub-zero nocturnal temperatures. The principal impediment was to carry enough supplies to last for two months. Other obstacles were negotiating access to the desert with the Chinese authorities and assembling a British, Chinese, Uyghur team augmented by thirty camels. The Taklamakan has bags of sand – it doesn’t have much else. Worth mentioning because when I was in the south Sahara we had to make a detour to find some sand – the terrain was mountainous, inhospitable, barren and beautiful but there were few sand dunes.
Charles Blackmore, formerly of the Green Jackets, conceived, enabled and led his polyglot team across the worst desert on Earth. He could not have succeeded without a support team able to re-supply him in the desert and without finding water in the desert for the camels. It was a gruelling crossing but all the humans made it – one camel didn’t. My contribution was to persuade The International Petroleum Exchange to provide sponsorship: £5,000.
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
(The Journey of the Magi, TS Eliot)