Celebrity timepieces

Luxury watch brands spend millions getting celebrities and sporting heroes to wear their products so they no doubt get excited when the timepieces make it into the general news. Last week saw plenty of coverage of the proposed sale of Sir Edmund Hillary's Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch. This was presented to the mountaineer after he scaled Everest in 1953 but is now stoking a bitter feud between his children and second wife, June. She wants to sell the watch, along with other items, but Hillary's two children claim it belongs to them. The explorer, who subsequently became the advertising face of Rolex, wore the watch during a 1957 expedition where he led a tractor team across Antarctica to the South Pole.

Another famous timepiece to come on the market is Lieutenant Don Walsh's specially-made Rolex that went with him all the way to the deepest part of the world's oceans in January 1960. Along with Jacques Piccard, Walsh descended seven miles to Mariana Trench in the Pacific in the Trieste, a specially built bathyscaphe. The explorer, 79, is auctioning the watch and it could fetch as much as £20,000 in New York.

To return to watch manufacturers sponsoring celebrities, Rolex all but invented the concept in 1927 when they persuaded a young woman called Mercedes Gleitze to wear one of their watches during one of her attempts to become the first woman to swim the English Channel. British Pathe footage of Gleitze can be seen here.

There, plenty more coverage for Rolex (and no, I'm not sponsored by them). Stories about all the above can be found in Those Who Dared.

Ian Fairweather

The Australian artist, Ian Fairweather, who died in 1974, is usually described as difficult, reclusive and a genius. The British-born son of a distinguished surgeon-general,who grew up on Jersey in a large house with a butler, rejected his privileged background and ended up living as a hermit on Bribie Island, Queensland.

Fairweather is usually viewed as an an artist of exceptional talent who produced paintings that merged everything from cubism, aboriginal art and Chinese calligraphy. Art critic, Robert Hughes, believed that "the emotional range and sheer breathtaking beauty" of Fairweather's finest pieces, such as Epiphany (below) surpassed all other Australian paintings.

However, as this recent article from the Australian explains, Fairweather is also remembered for a crazy ocean adventure when in April 1952 he set out alone from Darwin for Timor on a flimsy raft. This was made from materials he scavenged from the detritus of post-war Darwin such as torpedo shaped aluminium aircraft fuel tanks, driftwood and square sails made from parachute silk. He landed 16 days later on the Indonesian island of Roti, from where he was shipped back to Britain. He barely survived the voyage but in a later interview he explained "I wanted to get to Portuguese Timor, as the next best thing to Bali where I had done the best painting of my life after coming out of China 20 years or so before."

The artist Michael Stevenson recreated the raft in 2004:

Jacques Cousteau

Today sees the centenary of the birth of marine explorer Jacques Cousteau. The former French naval officer is famous for being an explorer, author, inventor of the aqualung, but is probably best remembered for the long-running television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which started in 1966.

This series was broadcast from the Calypso, a former British minesweeper. It was badly damaged in 1996, when a barge accidentally rammed into it in the port of Singapore. Now, his wife wants the French government to mark the anniversary of his birth by restoring the vessel to its former glory. "The Calypso is, in its way, the Eiffel Tower of the oceans," Francine Cousteau recently said, "I feel a duty to restore its soul... so it can be an ambassador of the environment in the years to come."

Cousteau died in 1997 and his reputation took a bit of a knock a couple of years later. Those Who Dared features an article about his 1953 book, The Silent World, and the following review of the film of the same name appeared in the Observer on December 1 1956.

Solo voyage round the world

After seven months and 23,000 nautical miles in her boat Ella's Pink Lady, Jessica Watson,16, has become the youngest person to sail solo around the world. While there is a dispute over whether or not she has sailed quite far enough to enter the record books, this is still a formidable achievement. Watson has hit back at her critics but whatever happens she's set to become a celebrity with a planned whirlwind "Meet Jessica" tour and soon to be published book.

This may seem a world away from Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail single-handedly around the world (1895-1898), but he also used the media by financing the three year voyage by a lecture tour en route.

No mention of Slocum is complete though without including the following stories. Firstly, the line that he sailed with only a compass, sextant and an old tin alarm clock which had lost its minute hand but which kept the hours after 'I boiled her.' Plus, the tale of how he once sprinkled carpet tacks on his ship's deck to deter barefoot pirates in Tierra del Fuego who boarded his boat as he slept.

On completing the Boston to Sydney section, the Guardian published the following on November 11 1896:

More detail followed on December 8 1896:

Dive to Deepest Point On Earth

Fifty years ago this week, two explorers made made the first descent of a vessel, manned or unmanned, to the deepest point of any ocean - a place where no one had been before, nor has been since.

On January 23 1960, Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard and US Navy Officer, Don Walsh travelled 11km down to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench of the Pacific Ocean in the Trieste, a specially designed deep sea diving vessel.

The expedition proved that life can survive in the extreme depths, with the hydronauts, seeing "weird white fish at the bottom," (Observer, January 24 1960.) This discovery was an important argument against the dumping of nuclear waste in ocean trenches.

A Japanese robotic craft, Kaiko, reached the bottom of Challenger Deep in 1995, and another visitor, Nereus, a remotely operated hybrid, touched down on May 31, 2009. Trieste's record may never be broken though due to the fear of a craft imploding. Those who have tried to repeat the amazing record all turned back at the 7.9km mark.

Read more about the trip on geology.com and The Explorers Journal.

Singlehanded across the Atlantic

Saturday's Daily Mail featured a story about Roz Savage who singlehandedly rowed across the Atlantic in 2006 and is now attempting to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. More information on her website.

Rowing across the Atlantic features in Those Who Dared, including the 1966 voyage of Chay Blyth and John Ridgway. My favourite story of adventurous crossings of the ocean though is that Alain Bombard who in 1952 undertook a single-handed sail-crossing from east to west in an inflatable dingy. His aim was to prove that a human being can survive for weeks if not months by drinking seawater and juice pressed from the flesh of fish.

Sixty-five days after leaving the Canary Islands he landed on a beach in Barbados. He was emaciated and anaemic but had proved that his body could stand up to a diet of raw fish and plankton, although he very nearly make it. Read more about his remarkable journey and life here.

Plastiki

Plastiki, a 60ft catamaran made from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles is due to set sail from San Francisco to Sydney, early in 2010. The object of the four month voyage is to highlight the Eastern Garbage Patch, a vast floating island of washed up, toxic marine pollution in the centre of the Pacific Ocean. This area, six times the size of the UK, is where currents converge and marine debris - 90% of it plastic - gathers.

The idea is the brainchild of David de Rothschild, founder of Adventure Ecology, and was inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's famed 1947 journey from Peru to Fiji on the balsa raft Kon-Tiki. Plastiki was conceived after the British explorer read a 2006 United Nations study estimating that 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating on every square mile of ocean. When he reaches Sydney, de Rothschild plans to recycle the vessel.

The project is also a showcase for the technology that can be created by recycling.The yacht has solar panels, a composting lavatory, a hydroponic garden to grow food and two exercise bicycles to power communication systems. Read an interview with de Rothschild here and see a video about the making of Plastiki here.

Knut Haugland and the Kon-Tiki voyage

Knut Haugland, the last of the six crewment who crossed the Pacific Ocean on the Kon-Tiki balsawood raft in 1947 has died aged 92. Led by Norwegian anthropologist, Thor Heyerdahl, the expedition aimed to prove the theory that people from South America could have crossed the Pacific on such craft to settle in the Polynesian islands. Heyerdahl came to this conclusion after recognising similar carvings in both locations and observing the steady westwards drift of clouds and ocean currents. Expert opinion stated that the expedition would fail, but after sailing over 4,000 miles, the raft made it from the coast of Peru to the Tuamotu Islands of French Polynesia.

Haugland's role aboard the Kon-Tiki was that of radio operator, keeping the outside world aware of the raft's stately progress during the long drift westwards on the currents off South America. Read more about his action-packed life here.

The expedition caught the popular postwar imagination and set a new benchmark for modern adventurers. In the wake of the Kon-Tiki's success there were numerous recreations of historical voyages. There was Tim Severin's Brendan Voyage, in which he sailed a leather-clad boat across the Atlantic, Hawaii's Hokule'a in which surfing legend Eddie Aikau died, and there was even the Guardian sponsored Vinland voyage. Led by journalist JRL Anderson, this retraced the 4000 mile route supposedly taken by Leif Eriksson from Greenland to an area near modern day Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, at the turn of the first millennium.

Interest in the Kon-Tiki really took off with the publication of the Heyerdahl's book of the voyage and an Oscar-winning film in 1950. The actual completion of the trip saw little more than a few news reports appearing in the Guardian, such as the following from August 12 1947.

(click to enlarge)

Captain Cook and the Royal Society

It ranks as one of the greatest sailing ship voyages in the history of exploration but Captain James Cook's second voyage is also remembered for the fact that he saved his crew from scurvy.

Between 1772 and 1775, Cook's ship HMS Resolution (and a consort ship HMS Adventure), came near to discovering Antarctica, charted the Pacific Islands and completed the first west to east circumnavigation in high latitudes. Once back in England, the explorer wrote to the Royal Society to reveal how not one of his crew had died of scurvy because he had filled the ship's hold with "sweet-wort", saurkraut, lemons and vegetables. For this discovery Cook was awarded the Society's gold Copley Medal.

The letter, along with many other scientific milestones described in Letters to the Royal Society, has just been published through an online library project called Trailblazing. Set up as part of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary celebrations, it includes everything from Isaac Newton's account of how white light is a blend of primary colours in the 1670s, through to Stephen Hawking's thoughts on black holes.

For more information on the 'plague of the sea', take a look at the BBC's Captain Cook and the Scourge of Scurvy.

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

There is yet another 'Best of' list of books to read, this time being Outside Magazine's The 10 Greatest Adventure Biographies. It's a wide-ranging collection featuring such diverse characters as Ernest Shackleton, Bruce Chatwin, Henry Morton Stanley and Marco Polo. And then there is Donald Crowhurst.

Donald Crowhurst was one of nine competitors who in June 1968 set out from Falmouth, England, on the Sunday Times Golden Globe, the world's first singlehanded nonstop round-the-world sailboat race. After battling with hurricanes and damaged equipment in a boat that many thought was unsuitable, the British sailor Robin Knox-Johnston was the only person to complete the race. His feat though was overshadowed by the bizarre journey of Crowhurst, who had secretly abandoned his attempt while reporting false positions in an attempt to claim the prize money without actually circling the globe, and then committed suicide. While he had designed marine navigation devices, it turned out that the man was in fact an inexperienced sailor who had bluffed his way into the event.

I always wanted to include the Crowhurst story in Those Who Dared but there was very little material about him in either the Guardian or the Observer. I eventually came across an excellent Malcolm Muggeridge review of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall. For an in depth essay about the sailor, I'd recommend Geoff Powter's We Cannot Fail: The Dark Psychology of Heroic Adventure.

Census of Marine Life

It has long been said that there are better maps of the moon than the Earth's ocean floor but the new Census of Marine Life reveals a little more about the 'twilight zone' where light barely penetrates. See a film about it here.

The census, a major international project surveying oceans, identified 17,650 species living deeper than 200 metres - the area where photosynthesis is impossible. Bizarre finds include an otopus with an elephant-like appearance, a tiny golden crustacean called a copepod (see left) and, more than 1.7 miles deep, a transparent sea cucumber filmed creeping forward on its many tentacles. Robot submersibles and sea-floor rovers, coring drills, dredges and trawling nets were used for the survey.

The news of this survey reminded me of reading about the excitement surrounding Dr William Beebe's deep sea discoveries in the 1930s - made with the help of the Bathysphere. This was a steel sphere equipped with look-out windows of fuzed quartz that made nearly twenty dives off Nonsuch Island, in the Bermudas, reaching a depth of 2,220 feet, the farthest that living man had then penetrated into the ocean.