Oil and watercolour, but mostly ice
My father had a passionate link with history,’ says Kari Herbert. ‘His whole life was coloured by the history of the explorers who went before him, and so, in a way, it was only natural that he should paint the polar world.’
Kari’s father, Sir Wally Herbert, a polar explorer of rare distinction, didn’t just paint history, he made it. During the course of his 50-year polar career, he racked up a truly impressive list of achievements. He travelled with dogs and in open boats for a total of well over 40,000 kilometres, more than half of which was through virgin territory. He mapped more than 120,000 square kilometres of new country in the Antarctic and he retraced the routes of many of the great explorers.
While it’s true that on 6 April 1969 he and his team of three fellow explorers made their way into the history books by becoming the first men to walk to the North Pole, it’s important to note that records and ‘firsts’ meant very little to Sir Wally. Although fiercely proud of his achievements as an explorer, a record was of no great significance unless it was underpinned by the quest for scientific knowledge, cartography or survey – without these it was of no significance at all. Bob Headland of the Scott Polar Research Institute summed up the nature of Sir Wally’s achievement in the Guardian earlier this year when he wrote in an obituary that he was ‘one of the last explorers of the polar regions who was able to make major contributions to geographical discovery and research’.
In recent years, Sir Wally’s achievements have become more widely recognised outside the polar community. On the last day of the 20th century, he was knighted ‘for services to polar exploration’, an acknowledgement many thought overdue. In the autumn of last year, he was honoured in an extraordinary gala event at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) headquarters in London, where colleagues from all walks of geographical life gathered to pay tribute to his achievements. Among his many accomplishments to come under the scrutiny of the great and the good from the world of exploration were his talents as a writer and an artist.
These two sides of Sir Wally have been brought together for the first time in a posthumous book entitled The Polar World – the fulfilment of his long-held dream of collecting his paintings into one book, to compensate for the fact that he had never had a major exhibition. The main reason for this was that as a working artist, his paintings often disappeared into private collections.
‘Most of Dad’s paintings were commissions,’ says Kari, ‘and there was a waiting list for his work, so it all got packed up and sent away within a couple of weeks of the paint drying.’ One such collector was renowned mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who commissioned Landfall of the James Caird on South Georgia (as well as the magnificent Everest, which appears in the book, despite having no obvious polar association). Luckily, Sir Wally was in the habit of recording his paintings for posterity with high-quality plate photographs before they were shipped, and it was from these transparencies that the book was assembled.
But it wasn’t easy. When Kari became involved, the book was still no more than a concept. They took the idea to various publishers, who turned them down flat, telling them that the book was too ambitious, too expensive and that such works on polar literature simply weren’t published these days. This reponse didn’t cut much ice with the father-and-daughter team: ‘With my father’s strength of mind, and my being... well, my father’s daughter, we weren’t going to take no for an answer.’
Their big break came when Nigel Winser, former deputy director of the RGS-IBG, introduced them to publisher Hal Robinson. ‘From that moment on,’ says Kari, ‘doors started to open and we started to make progress.’
Although Kari is at pains to point out that there is a significant literary content to The Polar World (Sir Wally wrote more than 50,000 words to support his paintings), it’s the art that will inevitably be the book’s main focus, and not just because it’s the first time the full body of his work can be seen within one set of boards. The design and the narrative flow also allow us to make sense of Sir Wally’s definitive oeuvre.
His paintings broadly fall into two categories: recreations of iconic historical scenes, such as Tera Nova Meets the Fram, and those that recall key moments of his own expeditions, such as North Pole Group No 1, 6th April 1969, where Sir Wally is pictured with his colleagues Fritz Koerner, Allan Gill and Ken Hedges.
The former group of paintings gives us a unique insight into his technical expertise – not merely intent on getting the Endurance and the Discovery correct down to the last spar and topsail, he also consulted almanacs to calculate the angle of the sun for the given date in order to achieve historical authenticity. According to Kari, ‘some of the nuts and bolts of these reconstructions have been taken from photographs, but when it comes to the light, the clouds and the ice, my father often drew on his own experience of the polar regions, and this is what gives them their unique authenticity.’
His more personal paintings, such as those of the Inuit, the ubiquitous polar bears and his beloved dogs, show Sir Wally’s compassionate side. Enduring the environments in which he spent so much time involves suffering great hardship, and there’s little room for sentiment. And yet there are no paintings made with more care and obvious affection than those such as Three Huskies, Northwest Greenland, Shaman & His Dogs and the awe-inspiring Crossing the North Pole.
Sir Wally was a man who loved the polar environment, and this is very evident in this remarkable collection of art. As Kari says: ‘When we consider his role as an explorer it helps to think of him as a pioneer such as Fridtjof Nansen.’ As with the early Norwegian explorer, Sir Wally was deeply in tune with the polar environment, and ‘so passionate about it, that his paintings show an intense connection with this extraordinary place. In many ways he was the embodiment of the polar wilderness.’
"Never, ever again!"
In this edited extract from The Polar World, Sir Wally Herbert describes getting caught in a blizzard with his partner Allan Gill during their epic first circumnavigation of Greenland in 1977–79
On 27 January 1978, with two very large teams of dogs, we finally set out from Dundas, near Thule airbase, and for the next 200 miles [322 kilometres] we were in territory we had passed through many times over the years. But up near the entrance to the Robeson Channel we ran into the first of our many problems. Here the sea-ice was very thin, badly fractured and extremely dangerous, and it was here, in this lethal-looking spot, that our camp was hit by hurricane-force wind. It was screeching across the six inches [15 centimetres] of ice on which our tent was precariously pitched and blowing straight out to the open sea. With the ice bending visibly under our weight, we expected to survive no more than ten minutes.
But that blizzard raged for 36 hours and by the time it had blown itself out, Allan and I were near total wrecks. For that 36 hours we had not been able to speak to each other because of the noise of the flapping tent, which had also given us splitting headaches and had made it impossible to light the stove, or to have anything to eat or drink. We had no choice but to sit there shivering – convinced by the reflected fear that we could see in each other’s eyes that we had only minutes to live. Small wonder then that when the wind finally eased enough for us to be able to shout above it, the first words spoken were: ‘never again’, ‘never, ever again!’.
Life of a polar knight
1934 Born in York, England
1952 Joins the Royal Engineers in Egypt. Takes three months to hitchhike back to the UK
1955 Newspaper falls into his lap and advert catches his eye: ‘Expedition to Antarctica - keen young men required.’ So starts his 50-year polar career
1968–69 Leads first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest axis and becomes the first to reach the North Pole on foot. Herbert says: ‘Trying to set foot upon it had been like trying to step on the shadow of a bird that was circling overhead’
1971–73 Lives with hunters in northwest Greenland with wife Mary and daughter Kari
1978–82 Together with Alan Gill, makes first attempt to circumnavigate Greenland with dog sledge and skin boat
1989 Publishes The Noose of Laurels, in which he uncovers evidence that Robert Peary may not have been the first man to reach the North Pole on foot in
1999 Knighted for ‘services to exploration’
October 2007
Kari’s father, Sir Wally Herbert, a polar explorer of rare distinction, didn’t just paint history, he made it. During the course of his 50-year polar career, he racked up a truly impressive list of achievements. He travelled with dogs and in open boats for a total of well over 40,000 kilometres, more than half of which was through virgin territory. He mapped more than 120,000 square kilometres of new country in the Antarctic and he retraced the routes of many of the great explorers.
While it’s true that on 6 April 1969 he and his team of three fellow explorers made their way into the history books by becoming the first men to walk to the North Pole, it’s important to note that records and ‘firsts’ meant very little to Sir Wally. Although fiercely proud of his achievements as an explorer, a record was of no great significance unless it was underpinned by the quest for scientific knowledge, cartography or survey – without these it was of no significance at all. Bob Headland of the Scott Polar Research Institute summed up the nature of Sir Wally’s achievement in the Guardian earlier this year when he wrote in an obituary that he was ‘one of the last explorers of the polar regions who was able to make major contributions to geographical discovery and research’.
In recent years, Sir Wally’s achievements have become more widely recognised outside the polar community. On the last day of the 20th century, he was knighted ‘for services to polar exploration’, an acknowledgement many thought overdue. In the autumn of last year, he was honoured in an extraordinary gala event at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) headquarters in London, where colleagues from all walks of geographical life gathered to pay tribute to his achievements. Among his many accomplishments to come under the scrutiny of the great and the good from the world of exploration were his talents as a writer and an artist.
These two sides of Sir Wally have been brought together for the first time in a posthumous book entitled The Polar World – the fulfilment of his long-held dream of collecting his paintings into one book, to compensate for the fact that he had never had a major exhibition. The main reason for this was that as a working artist, his paintings often disappeared into private collections.
Start the slideshow (5 pictures)
‘Most of Dad’s paintings were commissions,’ says Kari, ‘and there was a waiting list for his work, so it all got packed up and sent away within a couple of weeks of the paint drying.’ One such collector was renowned mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who commissioned Landfall of the James Caird on South Georgia (as well as the magnificent Everest, which appears in the book, despite having no obvious polar association). Luckily, Sir Wally was in the habit of recording his paintings for posterity with high-quality plate photographs before they were shipped, and it was from these transparencies that the book was assembled.
But it wasn’t easy. When Kari became involved, the book was still no more than a concept. They took the idea to various publishers, who turned them down flat, telling them that the book was too ambitious, too expensive and that such works on polar literature simply weren’t published these days. This reponse didn’t cut much ice with the father-and-daughter team: ‘With my father’s strength of mind, and my being... well, my father’s daughter, we weren’t going to take no for an answer.’
Their big break came when Nigel Winser, former deputy director of the RGS-IBG, introduced them to publisher Hal Robinson. ‘From that moment on,’ says Kari, ‘doors started to open and we started to make progress.’
Although Kari is at pains to point out that there is a significant literary content to The Polar World (Sir Wally wrote more than 50,000 words to support his paintings), it’s the art that will inevitably be the book’s main focus, and not just because it’s the first time the full body of his work can be seen within one set of boards. The design and the narrative flow also allow us to make sense of Sir Wally’s definitive oeuvre.
His paintings broadly fall into two categories: recreations of iconic historical scenes, such as Tera Nova Meets the Fram, and those that recall key moments of his own expeditions, such as North Pole Group No 1, 6th April 1969, where Sir Wally is pictured with his colleagues Fritz Koerner, Allan Gill and Ken Hedges.
The former group of paintings gives us a unique insight into his technical expertise – not merely intent on getting the Endurance and the Discovery correct down to the last spar and topsail, he also consulted almanacs to calculate the angle of the sun for the given date in order to achieve historical authenticity. According to Kari, ‘some of the nuts and bolts of these reconstructions have been taken from photographs, but when it comes to the light, the clouds and the ice, my father often drew on his own experience of the polar regions, and this is what gives them their unique authenticity.’
His more personal paintings, such as those of the Inuit, the ubiquitous polar bears and his beloved dogs, show Sir Wally’s compassionate side. Enduring the environments in which he spent so much time involves suffering great hardship, and there’s little room for sentiment. And yet there are no paintings made with more care and obvious affection than those such as Three Huskies, Northwest Greenland, Shaman & His Dogs and the awe-inspiring Crossing the North Pole.
Sir Wally was a man who loved the polar environment, and this is very evident in this remarkable collection of art. As Kari says: ‘When we consider his role as an explorer it helps to think of him as a pioneer such as Fridtjof Nansen.’ As with the early Norwegian explorer, Sir Wally was deeply in tune with the polar environment, and ‘so passionate about it, that his paintings show an intense connection with this extraordinary place. In many ways he was the embodiment of the polar wilderness.’
"Never, ever again!"
In this edited extract from The Polar World, Sir Wally Herbert describes getting caught in a blizzard with his partner Allan Gill during their epic first circumnavigation of Greenland in 1977–79
On 27 January 1978, with two very large teams of dogs, we finally set out from Dundas, near Thule airbase, and for the next 200 miles [322 kilometres] we were in territory we had passed through many times over the years. But up near the entrance to the Robeson Channel we ran into the first of our many problems. Here the sea-ice was very thin, badly fractured and extremely dangerous, and it was here, in this lethal-looking spot, that our camp was hit by hurricane-force wind. It was screeching across the six inches [15 centimetres] of ice on which our tent was precariously pitched and blowing straight out to the open sea. With the ice bending visibly under our weight, we expected to survive no more than ten minutes.
But that blizzard raged for 36 hours and by the time it had blown itself out, Allan and I were near total wrecks. For that 36 hours we had not been able to speak to each other because of the noise of the flapping tent, which had also given us splitting headaches and had made it impossible to light the stove, or to have anything to eat or drink. We had no choice but to sit there shivering – convinced by the reflected fear that we could see in each other’s eyes that we had only minutes to live. Small wonder then that when the wind finally eased enough for us to be able to shout above it, the first words spoken were: ‘never again’, ‘never, ever again!’.
Life of a polar knight
1934 Born in York, England
1952 Joins the Royal Engineers in Egypt. Takes three months to hitchhike back to the UK
1955 Newspaper falls into his lap and advert catches his eye: ‘Expedition to Antarctica - keen young men required.’ So starts his 50-year polar career
1968–69 Leads first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest axis and becomes the first to reach the North Pole on foot. Herbert says: ‘Trying to set foot upon it had been like trying to step on the shadow of a bird that was circling overhead’
1971–73 Lives with hunters in northwest Greenland with wife Mary and daughter Kari
1978–82 Together with Alan Gill, makes first attempt to circumnavigate Greenland with dog sledge and skin boat
1989 Publishes The Noose of Laurels, in which he uncovers evidence that Robert Peary may not have been the first man to reach the North Pole on foot in
1999 Knighted for ‘services to exploration’
October 2007
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